OEM FAIL

In Talking to Them

noreply@blogger.com (Calho) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 04:43:00 +0000

You realize you are farther out than they are or have ever been and you're alone again. But it's not so bad. I mean, at least your talking again. That's always nice most of the time.

Concept Space

noreply@blogger.com (Calho) — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 07:02:00 +0000

Feeling out the weight of the concept. I've gone with fingerslip as the title for the high latency, slow poetry, space. I'm conceptualizing the banner and side bar and general feel of it and working out the colors.

so far so good. I whittled the list down in terms of originality and mouth feel and intent and urgency in terms of what I really wanted to connect the content with the most.

And now it's just a matter of getting it all to gel in a web page friendly atmosphere.

Happy times.

///Starkey - "Eris" chasing dreams in a golden forest and night breathing cold on your heels.

Gestating Names

noreply@blogger.com (Calho) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 08:03:00 +0000

The low line is happening.

slowfluid
fingerslip
sunlance
powerdive
horsemenofthesun
highsequence
memoryanthem
keptaquaintance
throattwine
founderstext

Yes, I spent five hours doing this. Yes, it was hard. Yes, it would have been a lot easier if there weren't fifteen thousand dead blogs with catchy names still alive from 2002 that haven't been posted to in five years. Or, roughly, and my math isn't that great, but fifteen thousand days. Roughly. Probably more. Anyway, there were about three times more names that made it to the final cut. Two thirds were already taken. And five thirds were crappy for various reasons. Too cheap, too easy, too slow, too fast, too complex, too simple, too pandering, too monotone, too soft, too sexual, too written, too base, too serif-ed, too guilded, too quilled, etc, etc. These are the front runners.

The sad thing is, while I'm working on this I come across a ton of dead blogs. A ton of "this is my outlet"s. And they have clearly failed or moved on to other things that distract them or allow them some kind of other outlet or actually physically or maybe emotionally dead or just medicated. Enthralling and disheartening at the same time because I see it and I think "oh my god, I'm just like you, let's be friends" and then I understand they quit or walked away or grew out of it or whatever you want to call it for whatever reason.

The important thing is, the important thing being, the important thing seeing and I will tell you what you see, progress. I already had several design themes in mind and the name that wins out will probably be the one that fits the thema best. I'm not sure that's a word as much as it is a feeling. But yes. Usually it is fairly bad practice to name a color after you identify what color it is, but I am an impressionist and I see definites in swatches and brush strokes and it's much easier to name the thing after it exists instead of creating a name and top downing it.

So I'm thinking saturday will not be a terrible day to launch something new and old and new. It has been a long time coming. It will be fun to get my fingers dirty in adobe again. It's been a while. Too long. Like everything else. Well not even close to like everything else. the important thing is, and i can't stress that enough, the mind work is done. now it's getting down to the actionable items and I am gathering the disparate, the desperate, and the deserters to the factory floor because its not time to make weapons or war. It's time to make... period.

///Kinny and Horn - "Sacred Life" ...love the everything. Just write it all down cuz I don't really care. But I do. And that's why I foster love for the one's I don't dare. Be nice and sacrifice and play nice. Align. The world wasn't won in a day. The world wasn't one in a day. The world wasn't sung in a day. The world wasn't done in day. There's still time. So play.

Busy Signal and Dedication

noreply@blogger.com (Calho) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 07:31:00 +0000

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.

That Instant

noreply@blogger.com (Calho) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 09:36:00 +0000

You realize you haven't been keeping up with friends because you have been racing ahead like a dog with no leash.

Push Things Forward, the Trouble with Naming, and Depressing Ass Kids

noreply@blogger.com (Calho) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 07:48:00 +0000

Well, I have been trying to push things forward. Push myself forward. I have a lot undone. The OEM redesign, the low line poetry space. The lagging artwork. The dream transmission. There is no love lost for any of these things. It's not a lack of discipline as much as it is the trouble with naming things. Putting faces together is no small task. The difference between a great drawing and a forgettable one is in the details or the intentional removal of details. I know I can be painfully impressionistic so maybe you can understand the difficulty. I spent two hours today trying to name the damn low line space. Give it a name I could look at and say to myself and tongue over every day without feeling like a hack putz.

Some of the time was spent rereading things and looking for a glimmer of something that stood out against the rest that captured what it is supposed to be because the obvious name choices are largely taken. Doing so afforded me some options and I know I eventually have to jump. At some point I'm going to have to cross over. Ships not getting any closer. And I know I don't know how to swim so knowing that I have to stick the landing helps and hurts by turns. The point is I found some things. And I have to soup them up into something respectable or at least identifiable. But maybe those two things are one and the same.

I mean, even the most deplorable people. The skanks. The kings and queens of skankification are identifiable because they are such. And there is something respectable about that. So, what I'm saying is, all I'm saying is, that the two are not as independent of each other as people who are identifiable, respectable, or unique would like you to believe if they only possess, overtly, one of the characteristics. They're all in common. Kind of. More in common than any one occupant, formerly ascribing themselves to one category and none of the others, might be inclined to admit.

There is this kid where I work. There is a kid where everyone works. I swear to the lord baby barbecue sauce jesus that this kid is the most depressing human being I have ever met. And sometimes you meet people and you try to cheer them up. Hell, people have tried to cheer me up, and I realize it halfway through and I let myself feel some cheer, because sometimes the only thing making you miserable, really, is you and I am guilty of that sometimes. Life sucks for everyone but the difference is the things that would grant you bliss are the things other people have and experience, but the same goes for them in a kind of ridiculous tail eating Oroboros. It's not that the grass is always greener. Because it actually is. Except that the thing about the lawns is that as soon as you jump the fence, the lawn you left swaps places through an interdimensional doorway so you can't land on the same lawn twice so yes. It actually is greener so keep jumping, but what I'm trying to say is this kid is the most depressing human being I have met, possibly ever.

He's short. He's got a beard like mine except I'm pretty sure I am at least twenty years his senior in general life experience. He's fat. He lives in a rich neighborhood. He goes to rich kid school. And everything he says is drenched in this weird kind of "my life is terrible so go kill yourself" tint. I don't even know how he started hanging on to me. I think it was because I talked to him once in the breakroom while trying to figure out what to do with my last ten minutes since I mowed down my chicken fingers like gun range silhouettes.

He comes up to me and starts talking, because his job is pretty cush and I actually do not have time to talk. Like I literally have to be moving things and boxes around from point A to points B through Z for the next four hours or I won't get done, but he moseys in and starts talking and I feel compelled to at least listen because a lot of people only want to be listened to now and then. He starts complaining. About everything. Everything. His job, his living with his parents, classes (god damn I would kill to get back into class if killing someone did not automatically rule me out of scholastics and enroll me in the penal system), walking to work, his bike that is rusted because he didn't take care of it, his sleeping situation because his bed broke and he did not bother to fix it himself, sleeping on couches, and through it all I am bleeding out of my eyes trying not to set him straight about what the score really is.

Eventually I chime in that maybe he should not even try to look on the bright side. Sometime's there isn't one. This is true. Polyannism only gets you so far before you go crazy, push open ended IVs into your forearms, and go to sleep in a bath tub filled with hot water after downing a handle of Old Grand Dad. I follow it up though. I tell him that though there may not be a bright side that he can see there is definitely something to get up and get out for. I tell him he's in the best school district in Pittsburgh. I tell him his job offers him time to wander around and bullshit way more often (it's not the first time he has complained about free time) than mine does and that I would gladly swap with him as soon as possible (too which he wilted visibly), and that walking is by far not the worst way to get anywhere, and that a lot of people just don't have places to be and people should be happy just to have somewhere to go sometimes. I told him he should be happy to land a paycheck and have adventure in walking a two lane road with no sidewalks and no shoulder at night.

It all rolls off him like water on a greased duck. I cried a little inside. And got horny. And angry. For various reasons. But mostly I just wanted him to shut up. Not just shut up, but realize he still has a stupidly diverse number of options open to him and that all he has to do is man up, go to home depot, buy some one by four planks, and his bed is good as new and he won't have to bitch about it ever again. I think that's what grates me the most about this kid. There is no creativity. No compulsion to create. For me, when I see desolation, when I see desiccation, when I see absence and wanting in my own life, I begin to envision the ways to start over. Not always start over, but ways to modify. Sometimes the best solution is to burn it to the ground and pretend it never it happened.

However even that. The act of the torching, takes a hell of a lot of guts. It is never routine. It can never be a routine thing. The burning down. But how can this kid have no moxy and still be so inclined to lament. It's different when you've burned it all down to the foundation and the foundation itself refuses to yield to new constructions. That's a whole different box when you have to explode the foundation itself. It just. I don't know. I cried a little in the bathroom after he left. I did. Cock out at the urinal, I couldn't hold it back. It broke my heart some.

Knowing that he's not going to miss meals for a week because he can't pay for them. Knowing the worst day of his life will be the day he forgets to charge his music player. Knowing that he doesn't understand that his parents have pretty much kept him from the bonfire of life and he doesn't know it. Knowing that he's fat because he indulges in crappy food on his own. Knowing that he could fix his bed any time he wanted to if he just had an ounce of gumption and that he'll probably never know what it's like to sleep at bus stops because he didn't have the fare to get home or the energy because he walked ten miles in 15 mile an hour darkness just to get there and was too punch drunk with the thought of riding a bus home to check his pocket before he got there.

Kid is just depressing. The worst thing about it is the refusal. The active refusal to be cheered. Not even cheered, but pointed in the right direction. So I got stuck, by my own fault of planning, riding my bike home in the snow. All he did was complain about how it was snowing and his walk would be terrible. And I'm thinking to myself, jesus christos. Walking in snow equates to the worst day of your life? Buck up champ. Be glad your father didn't abuse you until you were nearly 25 years of age. I don't know. I don't know how deep the rabbit hole goes, but I do know that at least as little as I know, he knows even less.

But anyway, trying to wrap this up before I get too late and I'm late for work again. The redesign is coming. The winter design is coming too. I am pushing things forward because If i don't push nothing will pull and where does that leave us. So even if it is all psychological work. Even if none of it shows until it shows, let us push. The factory is hard at work b da and by night. And we will be there. We will always be there for you. No matter how ridiculously depressed you are.

///Daft Punk - "Solar Sailer" drift on

dear (______):

noreply@blogger.com (Calho) — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 05:22:00 +0000

Dear Denver Broncos,

Draft a quarterback.

Yours,

a person tired of hearing about your current maudlin QB's highs and lows

p.s. as a city, Denver already sucks. Lets just go ahead and not continue to shoot ourselves in the face m'kay

That Instant

noreply@blogger.com (Calho) — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 04:26:00 +0000

That instant you've been hanging doors for hours upon hours and you think "man, they should design a machine to do this, because I would buy that machine" and you realize that you are that machine and someone was so kind as to take you off the shelf and take you to their home to hang doors and you realize you really are happy.

dear (______):

noreply@blogger.com (Calho) — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 03:07:00 +0000

Dear Hollywood,

Until you can look yourself in the mirror and say honestly that this script, director, and producer will without a doubt top La Femme Nikita from 1990, STOP MAKING WOMAN ASSASSIN SECRET AGENT MOVIES.

sincerely,

a guy who likes woman assassin secret agent movies

The Ice-stache (grow one for your own safety), Hotwheels, No Age, and Serial Commitment

noreply@blogger.com (Calho) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 04:59:00 +0000

So I'm taking the next step toward building something to get me closer to making the writing I want to be able to make. Not necessarily the next step toward it as much as a reanimation, reorganization, of the effort. Partly, I want to get more from short stories and I can't expect to get more character development and practice from trying to cram more into small jars. Not that I haven't enjoyed the challenge and sucked at it and succeeded in parts and pieces (by my measure), but it presents problems with having a job and other things to chase after that are life necessities not granted. I have to step into something that won't force me to make endings where they don't belong and rush souls into bodies, and while there are people to animate and worlds to create, I have to give myself time where time is all too often short. And I need the pressure of show and tell to push it forward. The answer? Serials. One chapter at a time. The thing is, I can't even press myself into that old trap (I did once and it worked out well until a stretch of weeks where work overtook time available to chop a story into chapters and commit to staying put at the pen and paper to force out entire chapters, because, let's face it, not all chapters are created equal, so some days I could sit down and bang out a magnificently lengthy, but appropriately so, chapter and others days I couldn't because I had to go to bed at some point or stop to get ready for work, and things simply would not resume the same flow and grip it had when I left it and I ship wrecked myself repeatedly between the start of one and its end.

An organizational thing. Maybe show and tell is not the right motivator. It's hard to systematize it. I guess, part of it is that I don't trust myself to continue. I'm sure I could learn, at least I think I am sure that I need to force myself to learn. Learn the low lines, the high latency, and it's benefits. Put less pressure on myself and shift that strength of worry and fear of failed completion into something more positive, more enduring than the eye crossing, tongue chewing, wind sprint of watch hands across freed hours to produce things less panicked, scattered, and hit and miss spiny. Actually, as I'm talking this over, I think the best commitment to make may not be a serial one, but a commitment to development with fewer showings. Going farther down the rabbit hole is by necessity a thing that divorces a person from constant communication and seeing little dividends every day in views is encouraging. Encouragement is fairly impossible to come by. I envy the people that can get it often. So, in doing this I would be giving myself fewer opportunities to enjoy the little pats on the back, but I would also be putting myself in a position to work longer and more thoroughly on everything.

It's not a question of motivation anymore. At first it was. At first it was overcoming the fear of being connected to the things I do that I am passionate about that people might not agree with or could say "wow, you're terrible." I'm comfortable with that now. Have been for a while. Motivation came up when I lapsed for months and swore off all communication because I didn't feel like it. I couldn't feel it. I lost touch with the worlds in my mind and couldn't care to find them again, until things fell apart and I realized they are one of the few steady states, though changing, one of the few places where I feel myself all of the time. Anywhere can be learned to be home, but within my head everywhere is always home and it's like pulling up a chair with old friends I love and love to hate who know me and talk to me about things and we mull things over and they ask me about you and everyone else and they love and kill and do things I wish I could do and sometimes I do things they wish they could do and it's a back and forth that's so much a part of me I completely took it for granted for a while until I was utterly miserable and realized what was missing. It's not a question of motivation anymore. I have to engage it deeper and add taking care not to let the reduction of constant connection to a couple times a couple months get to me (it's not like I connect with people everyday this side of the bridge). Then again there will still be this in between to keep me company so it's not all bad. Not even half bad. Just not the conclusion I would have drawn this time last year.

Consider it a year end retooling of the factory. The final sessions of congress in a year that's not quite closed yet in my head.

Which takes me up to the ice-stache. So I'm walking home and it's a good 25 minute walk if I'm not running on most of my cylinders and my nose is running. Which is fine. You get used to it. Working in a cooler for hours a day, you can't rub your nose every single time it runs. By the end of the day you would have a red coke nose-ish hole in your face where your nostrils should be and then when you got home you'd have to deal with that junk all night only to go back to work in the cooler to repeat the process and get so nicked up about it that you end up putting a hole in the wall (that you'd have to fix) or putting a fist sized dent in your locker (that would probably get you suspended for a week and assigned to anger management when you got back [not that a week off from that crap would be a terrible thing, but I sat through anger management classes three times before and it's more of a pain than nursing busted knuckles and wrecked up wrist bones). You get used to it in the Winter.

The best thing about letting your nose run though, is that if you don't want to be talked to while you're out and about, letting your nose run is the best way to do it. People either assume you are a badass who does not give a fuck or are too retarded to realize your nose is running and therefore would not acknowledge, understand, or participate in a conflict along understood, predictable, or reasonable manner. Not to say that you wouldn't still get mugged by a coke head or someone not looking for reasonable conflict that sticks to standard rules of engagement. Which is why you can't just let your nose run. You have to make sure you are outside long enough for the snot and the condensation of your breathing against your upper lip and stache crystallize into ice and grow into a full on mustache of icicles. Then you are not just careless, retarded, devil-may-care, but you are also tough enough to be outdoors for long periods of time, possibly under dressed, with people and places you need to be that demand you be there regardless of the mode of transportation and that, potentially, these people will be looking for you if you don't show up when you said you would, and maybe you won't respond to threats and maybe you're late and have already had it up to your eyes with the weather, and walking untold distances, that you will absolutely blow up at the drop of a half smoked cigarette or suspicious footstep or even a "hey you" if you are kind enough to respond at all. So ice-stache it up. Worst comes to worst someone might yap at the back of your head, but all you have to do is turn around with your viking face on for a second and who wants to deal with that at any time of day? And then keep walking, because the only thing more certain to produce a fight, than engaging idle talk, is staring at groups of individuals when the only thing at stake is their bogus sense of pride. And after all, it is half past two A.M. and you still have a ways to go.

Hotwheels are amazing, by the way. Walking through stores and seeing the blue displays doesn't really bring me back to any particular period in my life, but I love cars. I dream about cars. Next to viking ice-staches, cars are awesome and every time I see them I want to know what exactly, which car exactly, is being modeled to scale and whether or not I can add it to my garage someday. Half the time it turns out to be some dopey made up car with ugly body work and funky orange tinted windows for some reason and chrome wheels in enormous flared wheel arches that pretty much touch the apex of the A pillar and the whole thing makes you scratch your head and wonder who thought it was a good idea.

Then every now and then, the thing that makes you stop and look every damn time, you stumble across a model of a DMC-12 DeLorean, or a Boss Mustang, or a bright blue and white Yenko Camaro, and you know you'll never make enough money to own them. You see a 240z in that hotwheels orange and blue blister pack and your eyes go wide because someone thought that fair lady from the 80s deserved to be forever immortalized on some lucky kids shelf and if you had a little less sense, maybe yours. You could have them all, and it's not at all about saving them because they might be worth something later, it's just to have them all in your fantasy garage made real, in a way, and be able to stroke the body work and see the curves from every angle you will never get to see them in person, quite possibly for as long as you live. It could be there, just for you, for a scant two bucks. That Ferrari GTO, right there at your fingertips, right there. You can feel the speed and feel the air slipping by the rear views and splitting away clean across the spoiler. I don't know when I'm going to outgrow hotwheels. Quite possibly never.

So that's it for now. That and there will never be that party that makes me feel my age. At least not in a physical sense where a person is like "oh my god, this hangover is too much. I can't drink like I used to." I already had that sense of that party where I was like "wow my beard is way thicker than the pubes any of these people have ever experienced in their lifetime if they never shaved them at any point between the time of their birth until now" and my beard wasn't even that thick. I definitely had it in terms of "wow the music I remember fondly in the club is all music by artists that stopped making music before these people owned their first discman. Oh wait, they've never even held a discman before. The hell am I doing here?" I also definitely had it in terms of overhearing fights and thinking "really, is it really that serious? Don't they have bills to pay or something?" But in terms of raw "too old to throw down..." never gonna happen. This old panther still has moves that'll make your mullet spin. That's from venture brothers. The best cartoon action series, possibly ever.

Let's work on it as we wrap this year up and catch up with the rest of the Earth. Orbit adjustments aboard the good ship.

///no song today. just some thought.

///just kidding. music is life.

///Paul Murphy - "Soul Call" This jazzy jem from Paul Murphy always makes me happy to be alive to hear it. It was a dead heat between this and Aphex Twin's Girl/Boy Song. Maybe next time around.

You Know When It's Time to Go Home

noreply@blogger.com (Calho) — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 08:50:00 +0000

I always know when it's time to go home. Not always. I do know, sometimes, when I've been somewhere too long. It's when the strangers start to show up. The man in the hat shows up first, but after that it's a grab bag. Not really a grab bag, but something more like "I don't know you. What are you doing here," and the question never gets answered. It makes me afraid. The non-answer. The people that show and I roll through my reality tests and it comes back "not a number." Like today.

Today I was just a working away and having a blast doing so. I cleared the jam in the nail gun without shooting myself in the face. I cleaned things up and did some organization. And then the flickering started. It started off as easy mistakes of perception. Mistakes of light and shadow and I didn't discount them because you have to keep track of what is happening and where and when and reference and double check them against the time key of the day. And then things began to metastasize and balloon and bleed into other things. It wasn't a sudden thing. Not a violent attack. It was a creeping back of the skin from a pin prick. And the pin prick started to tear across my eyes. And I was scared.

Who are you. Why are you here. Why won't you say anything. My mind races against itself. You see them enough times and they get names. For familiarity's sake. Because you can't keep referring to them by description. But, also for tracking. You have to keep track of what is changing and how much. Who is coming. Who is going. Who and what you haven't seen. Who is talking and when. Systematize it as a survival mechanism. As a way to boil the confusion into simple yes and no questions. Not see through the fog as much as teach yourself over and over again that what you are seeing is nothing more than fog. Teach yourself that who you are talking to is a symptom of a malady and nothing more. Work on it. Work on it. And then work on it some more, because you can't afford to slip again. And even if you could afford another mishap in terms of recovery time you couldn't afford it in terms of scar tissue. Mental scar tissue. You don't have that kind of real estate to allow acres to burn and not feel it, not lose the trust of the people who have given you that trust. And it's hard and really fucking scary sometimes.

It's difficult to paint it. Difficult to map out the progression from flickers of black birds and creeping lizards, to the shadowed men in the corners of rooms, to the arrival of the children and the man in the hat, to the free radicals lurking between the bars of the stairwell and the thing that kisses time space like a fist into a pool of still water. The disruptions grow and I can feel the temperature changing. I can feel the movement of the pieces across the board in a way that I know will lead to a break. I can't stop it, but I can leave...

Music Post Script

noreply@blogger.com (Calho) — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 11:09:00 +0000

///Sunlounger - "White Sand ...a summer for your winter...........a spring to your autumn... a love to the hate... a watchman at the gate... a mirror for your wall and a witness to your rise and every fall.

Tail Chaser's Song

noreply@blogger.com (Calho) — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 07:23:00 +0000

I've taken to chasing my tail. It's become a tall order. The getting after it with no reward. Become obsessed with the game. It's made it hard to come back here everyday that I know I should be here. And I should be. Because I know there are those who are gaming the same and I owe it to at least one of them, at least myself, and my plus one to continue to document something about the something. It's become not even a document of the trip, a blueprint of the why, as much as a motive for the maybe. I thing I gotta do.

I've. Been having the most fantastic dreams. I've been recording them via voice, but I have not been recording them with any amount of fidelity and I know the people that find them will not give them the treatment they need. I'm in no fit state or shape to make a record of my life. But I do love the activity. I was in a hot and heavy argument about religiontoday. It went on longer thqan I normally let these things progress largely because I thought I could make friends out of it, but friends made on the battle field of rhetoric are mostly enemies.

I told him religion was largely a communicative virus. A highly virulent and communicative strain of thought virus. difficult to cure and beneficial by turns sort of infection. It was a tough conversation to get through. A tough forty five minutes. But you soldier through. I'm just sorry I've been up to the bad magic that keeps me away from you. I had a great new years.

Iam stepping in stilting steps toward the things i said i would never do again years past. things like bad puncuation and bad spelling. things that make me harder to read and easier on me to communicate. Trying to stand tall in the self inflicted onslaught and become something more beautiful in the meantime. Something more enjoyable. Something more useful. Because I know meeting halfway isn't so much a positive policy as much as it is a mandate of existence. which makes me sad, but I can live with that.

But I think that the thing I understand most clearly is that I am still looking for my foil and havent found it and it makes the universe so much less, the master human equation so much less, without that counter, cross complement, and I feel like I am a minus with no theoretical plus sign that makes as much sense on paper as in action. But I'm doing my damnedest.

On the Muckers

noreply@blogger.com (Calho) — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 04:09:00 +0000

Finished the gift. It's strange to not have to worry about it. I get home and the docket is empty. I kick off the muckers and there's no sadness because there's no where else to walk in them. There are places I need to be and things I still need to do, but there is nothing hanging over. It's good and bad. Like a lot of things. It's a hard feeling to express. There's a pretty gaping gash where it was, the gift, and now that there's nothing in there to hold the tide aside it's washed high and hard. I wasn't expecting that. I probably should have been after working on it for so long. It's a backward empty nest kind of thing.

Not that the writing is unimportant anymore. If anything it is more important than it was as there is territory unoccupied and the last thing I need is to have the hunger for discovery eat me alive. I feel like I've been turned loose all over again. Learning what to do with that, because over the course of the work it was something that I unlearned. The timing was poor. Landed right in the holiday let down between Christmas and New Years, but I'm glad I did it. It had to be done. So it's time to dive in again. Time to shoe up the head saw and cut into myself with renewed abandon.

There's work still to be done. Year end looks. The year end playlist. Resolutions. Drawings. Poetry. Fiction. Sleeping. Games. Theories. Maybe even more stand up (but probably not for a while. I can't get my head around it to save my life) Sorry I've been away for so long. Part of finishing was really turning myself toward it with everything I had left after work days and work weeks. I think I miss the gut of the effort as much as the result. It didn't turn out exactly the way I wanted, but it was as close as I was going to get without getting lost in detail work and shoving the deadline to the horizon of another middle year. So we're back on it. I'm back on it. Time to see where the universe ends. Back from space, and off again into the star blacked banner of dreams.

That Instant

noreply@blogger.com (Calho) — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 07:51:00 +0000

That instant you realize you've been ending your day spitting into your spit jar and it's burgundy from spitting blood into it and you didn't realize it until now, but the music is so good.

Low Lighter

noreply@blogger.com (Calho) — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 08:52:00 +0000

I've been mulling craft over. Disappointed in the body so far. I try to grade myself week to week. Did I nail it? Did I glance it? Did I make something I can stand behind? The answers are easy in a lot of fields. Harder in writing. One thing I miss about college was workshops. Sure, half the people there are only there because they need to have creative arts credits or just needed something to add to their schedule they could coast through. That's the major difference between writers and other people. At least at that level.

The classes are only as hard as you make them. Writers make them some of the hardest classes they've ever taken. Other people don't. Humanities and social studies is like that. How deep do you want to drive into the subject matter? The same goes for many of the other largely subjective classes offered at university.

I've been asked more than once and probably too many times how a person, or how I, know that I am or they are a writer. The answer can be answered fairly simply in many different ways using very simple, and also very personal, tests. I am not saying the answer to the question is simple. It's always complicated, but can be simplified in terms of the writing being done. One of the tests, I believe, is the level of dissatisfaction with "good enough." Not the good enough that tells you that item A or B is amusing or digestible to other people, but the good enough that hits the points and edges, lines and graphs, of the things you want to map. If that lack of good enough directs you to work harder than you are a writer. If that lack of personal good enough draws you to an "oh well, I tried" sort of answer than you are probably not a writer, but did manage to put words together into a coherent string. I dunno. It's tough. Goes without saying at this point.

I haven't been disappointed with the effort as much as the second effort. I usually relied on working with criticisms to see where things were failing and where things work better. Part of learning how to write is learning how to simulate workshops within yourself. Time consuming stuff. What I have been doing is working on very short time scales. Hours instead of days and weeks and months. The pressure works well at sharpening the blade or at least keeping it sharp, but does not do enough, for me, to make progress. So I'm working on a new idea, an old one, but new to the times, on a new channel. A low line.

I've been riding the high line for a very long time and the problem is it does not leave enough time for gestation and things get excessively hit and miss and I'm not happy with that. I have to give myself time to step away and look at it again and punch it right in the craw until it's disfigured and see how I can make it better and then do it better and then look at it again. Give things time to precipitate. I haven't given myself that time partly because I over estimated what I can do (arrogance), but also because running back over what you've done is rarely pleasant. It's not fun or enjoyable to see how badly you put something together and that's a lack of discipline.

So a second Auralport is coming at a much lower line. It's not going to be about cranking out and pushing forward as much as it will be trying to put one gem together in a week. We're going dual channel. A thing for every place and a place for everything. Or something like that. Just trying to satisfy the urge to put pen to paper and make it something worth seeing just once. I want desperately to be better at it, but all I've got is me, so we're gonna figure this shit out and make something ill.

///Bowery Electric - "Freedom Fighter" ... cue dreams.

Have and Half Knots, Making Dead Lines, and Explosive Decompression

noreply@blogger.com (Calho) — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 07:04:00 +0000

So I think I am finally approaching upper lower class. Inching toward car ownership and consistent internet access that doesn't cut off if I watch ten feature length pornographic movies in one month. It only took a year to save up the money for both, but I'm not mad because that was roughly the time span I estimated so many moons ago. Not that I'm some kind of social climber, but it certainly makes life a lot easier for me (being that at least half of my waking time is dependent on connectivity). If I think about it the only reason why I have a job, let alone two, is because of the internet. A major factor in my escape from New York was the internet. My creative outlets, well three out of the five, are internet dependent. Not originally, but since I opened myself up to being read, along with the good and bad that comes from it, that is what they've become. A pair still remain personal and internet independent, and they are my babies, whom I coddle and pet unceasingly. So I'm not quite a "have", but I am the possessor of many knotted ends.

Everyone likes to sew things up. Who doesn't. From the youngest age you can remember some of the most satisfying moments are the moments when you connect one and one and get to bask in the glory of your hard earned, bent spined, but elegant in that way, two. Whatever operand falls between the two slivers of symbols matters little. All that matters is you put in the hard think and the finger fumbles and drew something out of two separate things that ended up being beautiful, simply, the answer. Not just an answer, but the only answer possible within the frames of the rules of everything else that described the world around you. That is clutch. That is what I want to be able to do, but instead of sewing my things up I have ended up with knot after knot, with some fine stitch work in between.

It's not failure. Every time you tried to tie your laces and ended up knotting the threads when you were little, you did not just sit down and cry. Well maybe sometimes I did. Eventually, though, I ended up going outside to play regardless because the fact of the matter was that I was not concerned so much with the ending. I was not so much concerned with the fact that eventually I would have to take the shoes off, as much as I knew, no matter what I did after the episode of frustration, the things were going to do what they were designed to do, and that was stay put. So although I am a possessor of more knots than neat and fixed loops, and although I will sit and cry about it for a while, I know that I can still go out and get it done with the best of them. The difference being when I get home and the game is over I have to cut the laces apart and rethread them.

Making deadlines is hard, in that way. Not that I have to start over every week, but the things people take for granted are things I have to redo every week and make them work like new all over again. I would be more upset about it, if I had not had to live with it for so long. It's the standard. Part of the allure of medication is that it offers the promise of a consistent starting point. It simplifies, to the detriment of other experiences. I alternately accept and reject that promise. It depends on how frustrated I get tying knots when I know and tell my fingers how to do things better and they refuse to respond. When I know and tell my fingers how to do things better and they answer and accept and then absent themselves from the chain of command altogether because it turns out I did not have the con to begin with.

Making deadlines is hard, but having deadlines helps the continuity. I think that's why I hate days off so much. Days off are like being thrust into the airlock of my ship half suited, half relaxed, half giddy just to be there without having a reason, and then the count begins for the hatch release and I realize it is for real. I realize there was something I set out to do when I entered and soon I will be sucking vacuum if I don't get it together and I have to fumble and scramble to abort the entire venture because my helmet is still sitting right where I left it, in the lounge, and there is no way I'm going to manage to make something meaningful out of the next ten seconds (ten hours) besides flailing for molecules.

That analogy was a stretch, but that's what it feels like. Trying to get things done without a hard plan is difficult. Days off are always unplanned. Uncharted and unplannable. The hardest thing about it is going without contact. When I'm down on the surface among people I know what's real for the most part. Well, for the some part. When all I have is time spent with myselves it's a dicey affair. Tremendous amounts of necessary dialog and balance checking and enforcing limitations. I wonder sometimes why I sleep so much. What is wrong with me? And the answer often comes back that I cannot afford not to. A little escapist as the life across the bridge is so damn rich and half the time I am awake I want to go back there, but also because it's so certain there. A is A. B is B. C is C. And D is D. Every time. Not like here. Here person A is sometimes Z. And B is an irrational number. And C is A, but only when Z is B.

Maybe that's why I like to work so much. Formulaic. Math in action. Inactivity through action. Long story shorter, I want to finish the gift for Christmas. A gift of intent. A gift of a promise that I won't stop fighting. Not yet anyway. So game on?

Yeah, I think so.

///luke slater - "Hectic Bag" ...start as you mean to grow on.

The Original

noreply@blogger.com (Calho) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 07:36:00 +0000

The original sideways scrolling adventure. Now with extra bits. Extra dimensions sold separately and subject to license and title restrictions. Not available in all states. Taxes and principles extra. All features subject to network availability and data rates may apply. Purchase now to receive your free weapons expansion pack and blue key.

The Best Thing

noreply@blogger.com (Calho) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 05:21:00 +0000

The best thing about winter aside from the Snow? No more @#$&@$$ mosquitoes.

Moving Pictures

noreply@blogger.com (Calho) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 05:11:00 +0000

I have been dodging, though I hope artfully. I have been fairly thick into writing as I should be. I had a bad spate of poetry that was sexual frustration pure and simple. It never got resolved but like the urge to work out or smoke it went away with time so I could get back to imagination. It's still there on the back burner crisping up into something unrecognizable, but it's a thing I can at least be okay with.

Had a major identity crisis. Not really a crisis as much as a realization that there is no way I can use somebody or let somebody use me again. Even if it is a mutual causation, a mutual understanding of the fact of the reduction of the human being to object. Basically I came to the understanding that shifting my expectations of what fucking is backward to the level of what someone else understands it to be, successful or not, is a failure on my part. It gets to the point where trying to meet someone halfway, because they don't believe knives should be involved and pretending you think that is okay with you when you are on the hunt for someone at least as open and screwed in the head case as you and also homosexual and who will not turn pale when you describe your dream date, becomes an effort to use someone to fulfill, by most standards, bad fantasies. And I'm a user of many things, but I will never use a human being. Hell, I would never use an animal for that matter.

I don't care two licks for most classes of emotions just because I don't feel many of them as they relate to relationships and friendships fairly often unless they fall into my pretty obscure and unrecognized code of ethics and procedure, but I do care for the idea of the preservation of happiness. I think that should be the governing principle in life. If everyone did everything they possibly could every day to disappoint the least amount of people... who am I kidding. That would be a terrible policy. On an individual level, an isolated level, it works, but scale it up and you don't have to go far before it produces stinging and awful results.

The point is I have been dodging you. At first I was dodging you because I had nothing to show. Then I had something to show, but I was so long away I was ashamed to return. And then I had something to show and was ashamed and then on top of that I was gone so long I felt what I had to show did not justify the length of the absence. And it went around and around and around until I came to be here to face the music, my own music, an orchestration I gestured on my own, all the while missing you and the me that could still make sentences. The worst is over, again. Missed out on health insurance. Not by my own lack of action. I was excluded because of how the time line fell into place. So I don't have to worry about meds in the short term. Which means I do have to worry. It's aggravating. Disparaging? Is that even the right word? No it is not. Disappointing. Anti-soothed.

I did put together a pair of stories. It was difficult. They were souping up and I ended up forcing both endings because I ran out of time. The problem was that the stories still had a few thousand words to go before they reached reasonable clipping points where they would sew themselves up nicely and I jumped the gun. Not an honest mistake. Just a regular mistake, but sometimes being able to move on to other things is a good thing. It's not like I can't go back and reopen the sutures, dig my fingers back in, and get the knife out. That's the best thing about having them out there in the bin. And they're not complete still births. Some things worked well and part of the work is learning what works and then using the structure and pieces later on to make other things better. Same thing with poetry. Anyway. Rearranging some things to get more out of myself without pushing too far over the line and shutting down.

Take care. I'll try to. I've been thinking of what I actually use facebook for. I think at this point my wall is basically an art space. Just one big ball of expression. An interactive art piece of sorts. I think I'm happy with that. I don't really use it for connecting with people. I don't think people use it for connecting with me. Maybe they do. Maybe it's pretty much as close as some people should get. I think I am okay with that too, most of the time, as anger management and interpersonal relations are not exactly fortes these days. Those social skills keep eroding because I hardly use them. Partly my own fault. Circling the camps. Every time I go in I'm reminded of why I shouldn't be there. So I'll keep balling up art.

Later on.

///Tricky - "Excess" I believe in people being.

dear (______):

noreply@blogger.com (Calho) — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 06:41:00 +0000

Dear Steelers fans,

Every game it looks like the Steelers may lose is not a "trap" game. There are definitions to these things. One definition you should learn is "Inadequate". Used in a sentence: the Steelers offense was inadequate to expect victory. Used in another sentence: the Steelers defense was inadequate against a sound offensive effort by the opposing team.

Sincerely,

An armchair coordinator and scout (at best) who is not so high on himself to believe every loss is due to apotheotic player talent and over achieving opposition or that he could somehow have been a more capable head coach for sixty minutes.

Base Two

noreply@blogger.com (Calho) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 10:21:00 +0000

On crack everything is more ridiculous. For instnace observe the following quotes:

"She runs her mouth like Jerry Springer guests ON CRACK."

"That athlete gets after the ball like a player ON CRACK."

"That game is intense, like the original Quake first person shooter ON CRACK."

"That qusar throws off radiation like a dwarf star ON CRACK."

Everything is more than it was on crack. Not to say that crack is an enhancer, because it is, but mostly to say that when people ascribe crack to something, no matter how warped it is, it instantly becomes ten times more warped and disproportionate a thing when crack is subscripted. Which is to say I just masturbated for an hour and a half to prove a point to myself. Which isn't a bad thing by itself. It's just part and parcel to the argument that conventional sexual relations are inferior. To what I can be. On crack.

No, but really I'm just desensitized to things. Common things. Which either makes me the best friend with benefits you've ever known or makes me incredibly desensitized. I'm beginning to think the title should have just been desensitization or something to that effect. I'm coming to the cutting floor.

The zone where production turns into product. If everything goes the way it should (it rarely does) I will have benefits. Health benefits. Which means that finally getting the meds I need won't be a faraway dream, but will be an actuality.

The actuality of the matter being that I will sleep on a consistent basis not by choice, not by conniving, not by cunning, not by hook or crook, but because I simply will not have any other options as reasonable courses of action because my body will simply shut itself down whether I am prepared or not. The actuality of the matter being the voices that I loathe, the voices that confuse and inflame and soothe by turns, will be banished and there will only be left a me that I do not and have not had an opportunity to know well enough will be all that is left. The actuality being that if the health benefits come to fruition, I will be plunged into a sea of knowingness that I have not yet known and that scares me.

I know it is something I have to do. Something that I have been substituting for in lieu of proper support. Something I have been, in part, fighting against because I have experienced before in older forays into medicinal remediation. But, medicine, like technology is ever advancing and I would be a fool to believe what happened then will happen again and I would be even more foolish to never try again though I have no hard and fast plans toward living 7 decades. But I am scared.

Though it is not stopping me from trying. The undiscovered country has to be the subtitle to some kind of star trek film. And if anything, I carry the spirit of the united federation of planets. But it leaves me saddened.

I've said goodbye to so many people. Don't make me say goodbye to the people I can and do still hold dear, though some hatefully so. It's necessary. I feel convicted to pursue it. Like, to not pursue it is the same as turning a blind eye to a rape. Except I am the victim and also the enforcing agent who can bring closure. With insurance, the cost of medication drops from 200 dollars a month to like 50. You can't ignore that. I can't ignore that.

So many questions arise. Who will I be on the other side? Will he know me? Will we be the same? What of the caucus?? Is it disbanded? I just want to be like you, but now that it is possibly here /I ama ==asking myself how90 mu4%ch it w@222ill cos..t me.

That Instant

noreply@blogger.com (Calho) — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 05:23:00 +0000

That instant you fly into a panic because someone might have called or text messaged you and you can't remember where you left your phone and search every pair of pants you even thought about wearing over the last two days and then realize your phone is on your desk, right where you left it. Still silent as a five day old dead goldfish.

But at least now you know where it is.

Why I Hate Coldplay and then Compliments Addressed, the Silence, Birthdays, Ant Eaters

noreply@blogger.com (Calho) — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 06:04:00 +0000

So today is exactly my 43rd birthday in the 26th iteration of my life. Not much bang, but there's not much buck, and, to be honest, how many knife fights with prostitutes is too much? The answer is one. One knife fight with anyone is probably too many. So I'm taking it on a lower key. Partially because I've had enough near death scrapes to make a fine scrap book of uniform crime reports and scars and partially because it sneaked up on me like a cat to a laser pointer's beam. I already had a midlife crisis. I'm still bouncing back from that. And to top it off, my latest scrape with my old friend was less of a scrape and more of a Houdini "how-the-hell-am-I-not-at-least-crippled-from-the-waist-down" kind of event and I'm not clapping my hands for an immediate encore.

43 feels the same as 42. The same as 41. Once you get over the major obstacle of realizing it's half over for all you have to offer, the rest is gravy. Things have been pleasantly silent. But I've been doing a lot of work to make it happen. Soused? Sometimes. The best thing about it is not the damage. Is not even the shortened life span, because I know I will pay for palatable living eventually, be it a massive med crash or the nick and chip of the slower knives offered by off the shelf substances, because all in all the final tally will sort itself out such that you cut years off the suffering (albeit by dying). The best thing about it is the silence. The knowing that you and only you are all present and mostly accounted for. That when people ask what you want to do, only one hand goes up in your head. When you ask yourself what to do next you hear one maybe two voices instead of ten.

I am still an anteater (fuck you). What I've also realized in the words of the illustrious coach Mike Tomlin is that the standard is the standard. I've been imagining Mike Tomlin covering my exploits in a post game/post week/post month press conference. He would probably say something like "an anteater is an anteater is an anteater. If we are anteaters it will show up on film and that film is our resume. Our resume speaks for itself. You either are an anteater or you aren't. There is no middle ground and when we can be anteaters it will show up in the work that we do." But I don't get press conference coverage. Or have coaches like Mike Tomlin, so I basically just tell myself when I don't get the outcome of my action 'dude, you're an anteater, what the hell did you think would happen?"

The silence has been nice though. I've been hanging the back end out there for almost too long though. Too many g's against tires whose grip I can never trust and part of me is waiting for the rubber to dissolve into the cloud of white smoke trumpeting from the rims for the naked rim to bite the asphalt like a starved dragon and flip my whole contraption so many times I'll be reduced to chunky tomato paste by the time it comes to halt on it's crumpled roof atop a sea of pelletized glass and unkempt infield next to the red and white rumble strips marking the path to the apex I should have targeted along the optimal path I could have taken had I the wiring and the vision and the opportunity to do so. So I enjoy the silence and try not to burn the envelope already torn to shreds back in high school when I realized my contents were not the sort of things that the postal service accepted as mail-able, transferable, items without special postage and allowances.

I did, however, receive a complement the other day from an older woman. It wasn't at all creepy. Not like the time I was walking back from the south side because the buses stopped running and I stopped at a bus stop just to read the schedule and make doubly sure and an old man who looked like Morgan Freeman after a bad Vegas weekend bender told me I was cute. That was creepy as hell. Plus I didn't know I was gay at the time so it was creepy and offensive and if I wasn't in a rush to rescue a friend from the clutches of a bad decision, but probably playing into her demand for a declaration of dedicated-ness by crossing town to get her, I probably would have stopped longer and been like "well, what the fuck is that supposed to mean, asshole?"

But anyway, I got a complement from an older lady the other day. She said I had a great smile. Now I have a prominent scar on my face that gashes from my eyebrow, down my cheek, and ends where my beard starts. I have a badly chipped front tooth from taking a dive onto cement. I have another scar from years ago where I took a similar dive, but broke my fall with my orbital bone instead of my mouth. And I have another set of scars from various head butts and several attempts to jump through a hallway's drywall ceiling. To have her see through that to that genuine grin she yanked out of me with her humor and honesty was touching. Because I mean she's got to be pushing 70, so she's seen her share of great smiles over the decades.

What was really touching about it is everyone says you're one in a million. That kind of phrasology, that kind of thought process, basically fires across the deck and no one blinks an eye. No one changes course. No one stands up and says "dear god, you are absolutely right! I must be wholly unique to this planet!" At least no one with half an ounce of sense. To believe that if you were able to gather together one million people, not a single one would have 99% of your interests, foibles, ticks, obsessions, addictions, and deficiencies in common is to be utterly blind to the simple fact that there are only so many configurations of expressibles. What differentiates then is the physical. That's what really makes you unique. So to have her say, whether true or not, off hand or not, that my smile sticks out in her nearly 7 decade long memory was totally awesome. It had me glowing while we made small talk. By the time she sauntered off I wondered if we would have gotten along just as well had she been 26 too, or if I'm the kind of person lovable only over fantastic spans of time and space.

Which is why I hate Coldplay. Not directly why. I hate Coldplay for the handful of fantastically cogent songs they've made. The songs that express the things people feel with uncanny accuracy, levity, and genius song writing. I hate Coldplay because I love their album with the figure of the guy with his head blown off on the cover, but I can't listen to it because of one song called The Scientist because the memories it brings back are still so raw and it describes those memories, the end of the formation of new memories just as good, with an intensity that is horrifically accurate it's like trying to sit down to a Rescue 911 marathon without a vomit bag for the blood, guts, bones, tears, and anguish you are about to see. It's not meant as a slight to them. it's good for them. Good for them for crafting something so intense. Good for them for wading through their own noise to get to the deep water. I guess I'm still doing that in many ways across several subjects. Assuming I don't drown first, but I'll keep kicking.

///Coldplay - "The Scientist" its not melodramatic. you have to put aside some of the common elements of regret to digest it, but those elements are, thankfully, few. but it speaks stories of information where so much pop is a glorified fragment blown out of proportion, chopped, and hashed with tons of loops and over production to fill the passage of time. ...going back to the start...

Road Speed Governor

noreply@blogger.com (Calho) — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 08:55:00 +0000

I've been writing dark. Writing dirty. Not nearly as profound as riding dirty. Profound is the wrong word. Provocative? Every day at it has been like riding down a highway in a two place coupe with a devil in the passenger seat. I think it's simple depression. As simple as depression can be. Swallowed whole by history. A bitter course. I don't know if it has to do with a ninth concussion (counting the ones I can remember) or if it's just the holiday press.

It's hard to tell sometimes. Wrecked my bike again a few days ago. It was a pretty bad trip. It made me sad in ways I didn't think it would. Aside from the disappointment of the failure. I just burned. I burned hard over a lot of things. Stutter stepping. Toward understanding. I guess the brush was tougher to swallow than I thought. It was easy to shake off when the adrenaline was coming, but since then it rolls me on and off like a riptide.

It's just,the pain of being, the knowingness of what that being is, can grow hurtful. Explosively so. It's easy to ignore the pain a lot of the time. Life as artifact. But trying to punch it up. I might be a bastard. I might be a jerk off. I might be dumb. I might be obsessive compulsive. But a sour puss, I am not.