OEM FAIL

Good Evening Hon'

noreply@blogger.com (Hobbes) — Tue, 11 Oct 2022 06:56:00 +0000

Every now and then

the horns blare

loud enough to hear

if you've sat quietly enough

long enough.

The CSX.

The coal train express.

See excess.

The CSX.

When it didn't matter whose car keys you left

at the fishing hole in the ignition

to make a joke seeing the CSX

on its way to demolition and

fireworks or laughter at keys and fleet feet

while 9 foot poles glimmered

with a bite.

Sometimes

sitting quietly enough. The horn blares

and carries through the valleys

of Pittsburgh,

echoes through the trees,

and rolls across a pillow,

to the ears.

All of the graffiti

traffic jams,

catfish and mud and grease gloves,

undrinkable fresh water,

shores of nails and glass and warm sand,

tunnels and bridges.

The quietly blaring horn

through the depths of Summer's coffin,

the songs of Autumnal pallbearers:

Can you hear?

You are already home.

Dear (_____)

noreply@blogger.com (Hobbes) — Sat, 11 Sep 2021 02:32:00 +0000

Dear Popeyes,

Stop sending me ads until you have more locations. Your chicken sandwich gave me diarrhea, your biscuits are absolute sand (if you put enough butter on anything it tastes like goldschlagger) and the chicken thighs are worth their weight, but not worth the fuel.

Sincerely,

A truck driving black dude

With A Passion

noreply@blogger.com (Hobbes) — Fri, 10 Sep 2021 08:12:00 +0000

I refuse to die. I think about death just about every day. Who doesn't. Yes that is a statement. I refuse to die. SHOW ME ALL OF MY LABELS. I will show you a complete set. A complete-ish set? I miss my friends. Am I alone. I am alone. I am l onea. O, am I lone. A olo nei.

Destrega. I have dreams about the end of the world. They are fun. Are you?

Dogfights are luscious.

I dreamt about trees falling and bears coming out of the woods across creek where I used to live in southern Maryland and the spider monster came down out of the bear tree limbs in the middle of winter and before the bears could get to the fawns grazing on what grasses were left behind in a mild thaw before the permafrost killed everything the tree sized monsters began swooping down to harvest the bears.

Their force began tipping the old and dead trees over, held up by ivy.

The entire thing began collapsing.

Have you ever heard the sound

of a tree hitting the ground

that was as large as you

can run?

The shadows were enormous. I ran fast. As fast as I could... the entire dream collapsed. The ground collapsed with the bass of the shear air the trunks displaced as they fell. The spiders were squashed. The bears became pelts and powdered glistening bone, when I had time to glance back at the pink mist.

I lived. The animals died. I panted. I watched

more trees fall with thick and thicker trunks, torn asunder like toothpicks before the clouds.

The troposphere. The fucking fickle thin layer of air that had just a little too much sun. God, some single batch would probably kill me so I dont have to know

what's coming next.

That Instant

noreply@blogger.com (Hobbes) — Fri, 10 Sep 2021 07:50:00 +0000

a customer speaks to you with words they would not use if they met you ninety five feet away and you know it for a fact because you stood up from the cash register and they realized (very quickly) that you were very able to drag and throw them through the sliding door toward the wrong end of pelletized glass over a difference of two dollars.

Where The Time Went VI

noreply@blogger.com (Hobbes) — Fri, 10 Sep 2021 07:45:00 +0000

Empty Set

I've been away for a very long time.

noreply@blogger.com (Hobbes) — Fri, 10 Sep 2021 07:44:00 +0000

I am still human. I don't know how to phrase it exavtly. i am sad. I am still me.

That Instant

noreply@blogger.com (Hobbes) — Sat, 26 Oct 2019 11:40:00 +0000

you see who they're still in touch with after you had a running fight for three months about them literally sexting them and staying out after hours way too late and magically happening to run into each other and finding out they're a known rapist and telling her and still they're just firing away ... you get the "ewwwwwwww gross, what the fuck?!?!?" feeling of surprise instead of a an "oh yeah, makes sense, why am I shocked at all that her behavior hasn't changed" feeling.

That Instant

noreply@blogger.com (Hobbes) — Mon, 21 Oct 2019 06:36:00 +0000

you realize you have to move your Al-Anon meeting, but you actually have to move your matinee film to fit around it and you gas at adult problems.

Dear (_____)

noreply@blogger.com (Hobbes) — Sat, 19 Oct 2019 07:06:00 +0000

Dear Alcohol,

I've been pretty high functioning for a while. I know I'll never be cured. There is no cure. I remember you. I remember everything you took from me. You took a person I wanted to marry from me the same way you took me from someone I wanted to marry more than a decade later. It's unreal being on the other side of you and the heartache. Feeling like there is nothing I can do to stop you. More than a decade ago, you snatched the first person that loved me away from me because I didn't know what you are. A decade of growth later. More than. I have changed and can see you for what you are. I can see your tendrils and suction cups, your butterfly wings that look like fungus and friendly moss, your horned growths and twigs and flowers and sun beam colors. I can see your off seasonal artisanal aromas and hellishly intriguing recipes for what they are. Your get togethers and time cheaters and machinery and armors plated with reactive impenetrable metal scales. I can see you and you've taken someone from me.

We are even.

We are square.

You took some of my friends, both of my uncles and a few aunts, my father's actual father that I never got to meet, my grandmother's husband, cousins, untold family members I'll never know, both of my parents by proxy, my childhood, myself away from my first real love, and my second real love away from me.

Fuck you.

I would say "never again", but the devils greatest feat was convincing the world it didn't exist.

You do.

Sincerely,

Hobbes

That Instant

noreply@blogger.com (Hobbes) — Sat, 19 Oct 2019 06:52:00 +0000

you walk up to an old man with more teeth missing than present and the few still in silver capped while he's speaking with your charge and he stands up and cannot recognize your face and goes "oooooooh, what's up dog" like he's seen you before, but you know the scars on your face make you pretty god damn unmistakable and you know for a fact he hasn't seen you before, but you play along just to see how comfy he'll try to get and you almost ask him where he knows you from.

That Instant

noreply@blogger.com (Hobbes) — Sat, 19 Oct 2019 06:47:00 +0000

you realize she was never bisexual after she's drunk herself into a raging stupor and shouts at you that you are a "cock sucking faggot."

That Instant

noreply@blogger.com (Hobbes) — Sat, 19 Oct 2019 06:38:00 +0000

you convince yourself that you are static, you have sentenced yourself to death and you should find a quiet plot of land with a porch and push your way in through the lattice along its side that a few enterprising rats chewed through and lay down to die.

Where the Time Went V

noreply@blogger.com (Hobbes) — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 08:18:00 +0000

Banished.

Banished from the lands. I almost said unfortunately. Fortune has little to do with what a person decides to do with their present. Fortune has everything to do with what and who you are up until "now", but maybe fifty percent to do with after. Fortune has fifty percent or less to do with what happens to you after you realize what the system is and what you're in for and who you are and where you've been with an open eye. Of course, you've still got to get "lucky" in part for good things to happen to you, but you also have to be prepared to act.

Banished and returned out of sympathy for their survival, them having flailed in the vacuum of space and been over matched by the very things they spat in my face they could handle on their own so often and myself being fed incomplete information (what I call lies and they call "telling the full truth when they're ready"). So now we are trapped into providing shelter for the wayward addict and trying to lay down ground rules in their defiance and abuse of kindness. Few things feel more alone than living with someone who is not prepared or capable yet of living outside of their own interests, whatever those interests may be.

If you're still in the mindset of "I am a fuck up, I can't do this" and won't even honest to yourself try, you're going to miss it. Four months long attempts at trying to wake them up to that simplicity. Trying to be the best person I could be toward the person I loved. Maximum effort. Whether I wanted to or not, whether I was upset or not, whether it would cost me or not. We had a conversation the other evening about what love is. Is it an emotion? A feeling? A pile of chemicals? An exchange of ideas, ideals, memories, and hopes? Is it that metaphorical eternal flame of the soul and yadda yadda that keeps everything and everyone connected and relationships blossom where the connections happen to be stronger instead of weaker? She sort of fumbled around for some time, at points fading into and out of the "a person can fall into and out of love conundrum so it can only be, but so much of this or that and" basically a word salad of chopped up experiences, tossed with a little salt and vinegarette and served halting.

Love at its core is sacrifice. Love is willfully putting yourself second for the betterment of someone else. Love is not whispering "I would die for you" while your heads lay on the same pillow and your faces are six inches away from each other. Every time someone tells me they would die for me I tell them to live for me.

I'm not looking for apologies anymore. Whatever form they come in, apologies, an acknowledgement that you did something that did not account for that action's, that decision's, that event's happening's impact on my life, or you did and chose to disregard it, or you did and it did not weigh out to enough to sway you, but you cared enough to inform me and help me better understand where I fall in your calculus and explore the otherverses of paths so that we can figure out whether we should or should not cross paths in the future, if it can be avoided.

I am looking for changes in behavior. Whatever forms the apologies take, if you find yourself offering apologies and sacrifices to the same You, it is vainity at its root. Isn't it? As long as you can forgive you, everything should be good with the person you are bowing your head for the knife for. As long as you're in the loop, you are your own executioner. And yes, you will die in dramatic fashion. The applause will rain. Everyone will believe something was accomplished in the display. The executioner will go to their home, once the crowd applause fade, and there's some sort of proclamation about sins and wrongs and the pigeons and crows will come to peck up the bits of food the audience left in the courtyard. The morticians will get to work and the janitors too. The executioner's phone will buzz a "hey, are you up? Let's hang out" the following night. You'll do your make up, cross legged on the floor, and say to yourself you must go meet so-and-so because...

Apologies and "sorry" are not worthless. They carry some merit on their own, though tacit.

You'll befriend fall guys and walking excuses and you'll apologize later. Beheading yourself used to mean something. It used to be painful. Cognitive dissonance is something for therapy couches, though. Why respect the opinions of people that have spent their lives studying people, just like you. With enough repetitions, a person can become anything they want to be.

///Fatboy Slim - "The State We're In" ~

Where the Time Went IV (the message)

noreply@blogger.com (Hobbes) — Fri, 30 Aug 2019 08:02:00 +0000

Make no mistake: you are not alone, you have not been abandoned, you have not been forsaken, you have not been left to die.  It's up to you what you want your future to be.

Chris

Until you figure that out, you cannot affect anyone else's in a meaningful and lasting way.  You don't even have to love yourself to at least see the future.  Your futures.  You are old, just like me.  Aged beyond your years too early, just like me.  Scarred beyond belief, just like me.

Chris

Our responses to it have been diametrically opposed in the now, but I was just like you.

Chris

Pain is inevitable, physical and spiritual, inevitable the same.  Pain does not have to color every aspect of your life.  It is not the boogieman.  See it, know it, embrace it, splow it out, and keep it moving.  It will be your acquaintance from then, until now, and on until the day you die.

Chris

We've both learned death seals nothing.  The scars don't evaporate.  Minds don't change.  Facts don't change.  History does not adjust for you and your happiness.  So find your own.  Make your own.  At some point, you have to stop looking back and look ahead at what's in front of you instead of where you've been, who you were, and what you did for answers.

Chris

Spoiler alert: the answers aren't there.  You already know everything that's happened.  You already know your potential.  You already know you are misfit amongst the trash of humanity and far too intelligent to pretend without wincing and dying a little more on the inside each time you muffle who you are to wallow and rub shoulders with the lost beyond repaired

Chris

The rut dwellers, the routiners, the folks that are happy with status quo because "at least nothing else can be blamed on me for trying"

try

Don't be afraid.

Chris

It is flat out terrifying.  You've had your wake up calls and bells like the thunder on the surface of Jupiter and his storm systems large enough to engulf several Earths.  You've heard them and you still shut your blinds and tell yourself it's fine... just a Summer squall... it'll pass... just a few inches of water...

Chris

Wake up darlin'

It's not too late.

Chris

You've got to stop burying yourself alive unless you truly need to die.  Not "want", need.  Must.  Have to.  Everybody wants to die at some point in their lives.  Some of us, myself included, want to die several times over in a single day and/or kill everyone on the face of the Earth to be alone in life and therefore happy, by any means, and complete in an enforced (and extremely costly) peace.

Chris

What you choose to do will echo for decades through not just your life, but several others.  If that does not sway you, before you give up on what you clearly do not know with any certainty whatsoever because YOU'VE LITERALLY NEVER DONE IT OR TRIED WITH ANY MORE TENACITY THAN YOU WOULD GOING TO A DRIVE THROUGH AND FINDING IT CLOSED AND GIVING UP ON EATING FOR AN EVENING give it a chance.

Chris

Give it a chance.

Give it a chance.

Give yourself a chance.

Chris

Has it ever occured to you that maybe, just maybe, this time around, you should give yourself a chance and tell the "I know myself well enough and I'm not going to waste my time" version of you to, for once, give the you that has lived and experienced a real relationship a chance to actually go find herself.  You change as time passes.  Your old rules of thumb don't apply anymore.

Chris

Your first boy is a man.  Your second boy is about to enter Kindergarten (time will fly).

Chris

Why delay any longer to get yourself right?  Truly right?  You are out of time to pussyfoot and pretend you can make it up as you go.  You must grow up.  You can still be a big kid, but it's time to bring that child, that inner, fuggit I'll do it tomorrow, fuggit I have enough time for one bump, fuggit I don't care today, fuggit I'll just reschedule, fuggit fuggit fuggit I can do everything and anything I want, you into the bigger and much more important picture of what you want to be.

Chris

Stop putting it off.  Stop placing that responsibility on what happens to you.  Stop giving that power away.  Stop having a reason why things don't happen and start building.

Chris

Start keeping schedules.  Start keeping goals.  Start planning.  Stop reacting and start being active in your own life.  You can't afford to drift anymore.  You cannot just be in your bubble.  That bubble burst a long time ago.  You are crowd surfing on an empty infield and the band left four years ago, but they still haven't swept the venue and the stadium shut down right after the show.

Chris

Those aren't people's hands, you've been lying on the ground in weeds six feet tall with now indigenous wildlife occassionally coming by while you hum tunes that haven't graced an ear since the place was littered with ticket stubs way back when.  Wake up.

Chris

Time is running out.  Take control of your future or don't.  Keep convincing yourself you're alone or don't.  Continue to tell yourself lullabys of the past or see a future for yourself.  Continue to howl at ghosts for wounds that have bled out and scarred over or walk into tomorrow scarred and stronger because you can help someone else get through those horrors in a meaningful and lasting way.....  or don't.

Chris

Your future is in your hands.

Chris

The knowledge and the power therein encapsulated in your history can and should be paid forward to your sons.  Remember that the next time you tell me I don't love them.  Prove to them that you truly love them.  Don't prove it to me.  Prove it to yourself.

Chris

I have nothing to prove to [][][][][][][] or [][][] (and the crazy thing is I've never even met your eldest son and I know in my heart I have nothing to prove for him to know that I love him - you figure that one out, my pirate queen), but you do.  Show them; don't talk about it and weep over it when you're restless and drunk.  Show them.

Chris

Don't show me... show them.

Prove it to yourself.

Chris

I love you.  I don't just live for me.  I live for my little sister, for you, for the people you care about, for your family, for my friends, to bury my father and mother and see them underground, for the people that are fighting similar battles and losing wars, for breathing in nature, for recording history, for music, for things that only I can create because I am YES a unique instance of isness amongst the billions on this overcrowded planet, and yeah sometimes just for me to get high and laugh for a day or two or a month because if I'm going to be stuck on earth and never see space travel I may as well dream about it and make up some fireside sci-fi stories to share because that's fun!

Chris

Live and live well.  Die and die alone.  Die well and live alone?  Good luck.  Live well and die alone?  That's even worse.

Live well and die well.  They don't have to be mutually exclusive.

That Instant

noreply@blogger.com (Hobbes) — Mon, 26 Aug 2019 04:29:00 +0000

The floor begins to tremble and you hear the single, high pitched, distant screech of the midnight freight train pierce the walls of your bedroom and you remember how much you loved to go for bike rides at night to feel that sound in your bones.

Where The Time Went III

noreply@blogger.com (Hobbes) — Fri, 23 Aug 2019 07:47:00 +0000

I do suppose, at a point you have to trust your partner. No more benders. No more lost weeks. No more blackouts. If that is where the line must be drawn...

...the line should've been drawn a long time ago. I have to become comfortable with notion that my partner will be homeless outright. I've been there. I don't want to do it to someone else. The truth is I'm not doing it to them. They are doing it to themselves.

Is there more I could've done? Sure. Is there more I could've done without killing myself? No. Clarity. Clarity. Clarity. Can't hit he. Can't hit he can't hit. He can't hit. He can't hit. He. Clarity. Clarity. Clarity. Vocal cord rehearsals to explain to her that everything has been askew for almost two years because of her addictions. The motorbike in the backyard still collects rust because of her addictions. The home mortgage fund is short $4000 over two years because of her addictions.

Rehearsing answers to her inevitable retorts and fits of anger.

Rehearse.

Rehearse.

Rehearse.

And know it. Know it like the creases on the back of your hands because they will always be tested. When your support is the rock at the bottom, don't flinch. If it means cutting that base out, try to even though you are crying tears of blood behind stony eyes.

///I miss being able to listen to music without submitting to a five hour long rant about songs we've already listened to the last time hammers fell. Her addiction took even that away from me and she still does not see what it's cost beyond a dollar sign.

Life With Alcoholism

noreply@blogger.com (Hobbes) — Sat, 03 Aug 2019 01:25:00 +0000

When your friend says "hey, do you want to dress up and go out to (insert bar here) for an hour" after that friend just got done screaming at you 48 hours earlier for not spending your last dollars to buy them a beer at 4 A.M. when they'd spent their entire day drinking and you immediately feel your stomach turn and your eyes gloss over with dread.

If you say no: they'll just go out anyway, be angry with you all night because "we never go anywhere", probably spend far too much money, call you to pick them up, be further upset with you for not trusting them and for "always being tired", and be irritated that "we never spend time together", be angry with you for "judging" wanting to have a good time.

If you say yes: wherever you go they won't want to leave after an hour, pressure you to drink more than you want (if you decide to drink at all), convince you to spend too much money or spend it themselves, try to get you to bring something back to the house for later (but really that night), go out again anyway if you do get home early, make you feel miserable for going cautiously/reluctantly, be upset with you for thinking about how you'll feel tomorrow, be annoyed with you the entire outing for thinking about the chores & things you still need to do at home.

Where The Time Went II

noreply@blogger.com (Hobbes) — Fri, 12 Jul 2019 13:50:00 +0000

Four flame outs later and several lives ago.

That Instant

noreply@blogger.com (Hobbes) — Fri, 12 Jul 2019 13:47:00 +0000

You realize you are pushing your cycles and cams and pistons and engraved toothsets of finished brass over to force change so the person who loves you can see your moss and lichened belly clearly.

Dear (_____)

noreply@blogger.com (Hobbes) — Wed, 17 Oct 2018 20:26:00 +0000

Dear piercing hip pain,

We've ruled out kidney stones, appendicitis, burst and displaced disks in the spine, and abdominal tears. Could you please just tell me what you are? Is that so difficult? This whole shell game of taped up notes is getting awfully passive aggressive and I can't keep guessing what's wrong every day and adjusting my work schedule on the fly. I have to work! I am needed! There are deadlines to meet. So what is it today? Who exactly are you that I'm sharing my body with? No one even told me you signed a lease. Tendon inflammation? Lack of rest? Too much stretching? Low pressure swelling? Tiny chunk of bone?! Cartiledge tear?!?! A welcome to old age and the gift is "this is the rest of your life til you die"?!?!?! Stop me if I guess your name!

Sincerely,

Occasionally Bed Ridden at 33

Where The Time Went

noreply@blogger.com (Hobbes) — Mon, 01 Oct 2018 11:31:00 +0000

I haven't been lost. I've been sitting beside a home made transceiver trying to reach a ship in the vicinity. I've been on board it a few times with no signs of life. Each time I return to my junker it goes off and I race to the comms deck to respond. Each time I do- static.

Each time I board it there are freshly opened meals, a coffee sack still warm, a cigarette drifting with flecks of ash still floating and clouds of smoke swaying in the recycled air. A saucer and chipped cup and different music playing in the background over the public address. Breathable 65 degree air. A few playing cards that weren't there before. A display still picking up signals from Sol from 1989 when they aren't playing static. A ghost ship. I turn off the distress beacon and return to my junker to figure out what to do with it.

I can't turn it over to the scrappers just yet. Not with people aboard. Their machines will shred it with no regard for souls. If someone is on that ship, I can't forgive myself. If someone is on that ship, I hope to make contact soon. The trade hub orbiting Europa is still four days journey from our position in the Oort. Remember how lovely the grass was down on Terra? If I can bring this thing back in one piece, there'll be a fortune and a vacation waiting for us.

Someone is on that ship. I will find them.

Captain Jexel Hobbes of the Noway Accel- 10201800278

Time has flown by. I've missed so many deadlines I wanted to hit. When was the last time we spoke?

RAM is going to take a serious investment. I know that the mother board can handle it and I've tried a half dozen times different combinations of chips to blow it to the 16 gigabytes that it can do. I've allowed the bottleneck to become a road block on producing art. I fell in love back in March. Sacrificing and sacrificing over and over to try to bring another person into my world, but most efforts have failed.

I've asked her dozens, but not yet hundreds of times to meet me half way. She continues to do the same things she does, not because she doesn't love me as much as I love her, but because it is all she knows and has known since she was small. I do think that it's possible to change, I know it is. Everyone deserves a chance. There is a spark in her. If I can help, I will. I didn't get to where I am in life without help. How can a person conscious of this turn away another and another who actually kind of sort of understands you?

I am beginning to wonder if she actually does or if she is a part of my life because I am so different from everything she once knew and cares more about being truly loved as a person than....... she does love fairly unconditionally. Maybe that's a part of the problem. She can't tell the difference between someone who actually cares for her and someone who is using her. It's a possibility. It can be solved.

How do you speak to someone who is jammed with ultimatums and unwilling to discern? How do you speak to someone who cannot see the consequences of their actions beyond a week, beyond a month, beyond 12 hours? How do you reach an addict? I am one. She's not on another level. She hasn't allowed herself into the terrors of introspection.

She flies away from the heat. She creates reason mazes. Responsibility mazes. Agency dead falls. I understand the fear. How can you explain that fear in your own life to someone who hasn't acknowledged it within their own space? I suppose that goes back to the old adage: how can you love someone, if you cannot love yourself. I don't know what to do when I see her setting herself up for apologies. It's how she's gotten by. The other adage: don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness.

I never thought that I would fall in love again. I knew I would. I did not believe, however, that it would be more than a passing fancy. Survival is paramount. Survival comes with its costs. One of the costs is you do not get to enjoy stable long term relationships because you must survive. If two survivors meet, there's a match and a stable long term relationship can grow there because there is no dependence. There is only a mutual companionship. Do not tell me you would die for me. Live with me.

I am afraid this will not work and I may have to eject her through an escape pod into the vacuum of space with a few months survival kit, a beacon, and a radio.

The largest red flag wasn't history, or family composition, or addiction. The largest red flag remains a dearth of creative thought. A nagging inability to see what's possible instead of what's here.

One year. One year. I will gift her one year of my life. I was given less to reach further and, for some of it, I destructed because I didn't know what and who I was and a heavy portion was out of my control from the outset. Everyone deserves a chance to grow. Everyone! I know she can do it. We have so much in common and beautifully so. I do love her after believing that I did not have the capacity to love again after everything my circuits have been sheared through. I am a part of my ship, incorporated, built, and breathing, designed, redesigned, scrapped, prototyped, burned, and rebuilt anew.

The larger mission is still to build a map for the sojourners after I am long gone and someone else is stumbling upon my space station and docked junker broadcasting songs no one has heard in decades and curious what the hell a space station is doing 15 light years away from Sol in dead space.

I have compassion. I know that I am a pretty tough ticket 300 out of 365 days, but I can feel and I can be and am conscious of my bipolar schizophrenia. Occasionally it gets away from me, but not nearly as often as it once did. I can protect her and my friends from it (it's impossible to protect one's self).

One year from the day we met in March.

Synchronize watches.

///Way Out West - "Northern Lights" radiata

That Instant

noreply@blogger.com (Hobbes) — Sat, 18 Aug 2018 06:32:00 +0000

you remember blacking out was a reasonable solution.

Dear (_____)

noreply@blogger.com (Hobbes) — Sat, 11 Aug 2018 10:05:00 +0000

Dear future self,

You are going to check in on your parents through approximate channels and they will not have changed since they expressed themselves two decades ago and since you spoke to them last nine years ago.

It's okay to not be surprised. Don't waste yourself hoping for bullshit.

sincerely,

feral

P.S. There is no home to go back to. What was left was not home.

That Instant

noreply@blogger.com (Hobbes) — Mon, 02 Jul 2018 08:51:00 +0000

you understand you are creating outside of yourself because there remains an enormous gap in language that will not bridge itself.

Driving Stick (Fairlady 280Z)

noreply@blogger.com (Hobbes) — Thu, 28 Jun 2018 15:29:00 +0000

I think my pops saw a spark in me and didn't know how to feed it.

I think, faced with something completely different from his first two children, he hit a language wall. This one has the design eye, this second one does too. "This third one has an eye, but why is it obsessed with physics and manipulating form and space instead of creating on a canvas?"

Learning to drive stick was a massive challenge. Enter the F-250 1996 V8 5.8 Liters of displacement in a breath. Stupid torque and no horsepower.

The thing was, you never knew if he was taking you for a ride to explain to you why you had a beating coming or not. Sometimes it was Billy Graham, sometimes it was the guy who always had that quotable audio clip at the beginning of his radio show "lay up treasure in heaven" (it always made me laugh inside thinking about how does suffering now get you a v.i.p. pass to heaven and how dumb it felt watching years spin by and thinking 'the forsaken are now!')

There was this one day, he may have been driving me to work at Six Flags Great America or some shit, but we were in his 280 ZX that myself, my younger sister, and I don't remember if my older brother was there or not, but we washed and detailed that car. Cleaned from the floor mats to the spots where you put your fingers on the sill to push the passenger door open to the stock rims and the corners of the chrome trim around the rear window to the toe kicks along the foot of the door sills.

I can't remember what day it was specifically; Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday. We drove.

I may have missed the bus for the umpteenth time and he happened to be off work that day and heard me come back into the house absentee.

At any rate, what I do remember was this:

Before I took on driving school and getting licensed proper, he took his hand off of the stick shift and began calling out gears to me. I didn't know what to do. In the empty space he would shift and calmly call the next position the shiftknob was supposed to be in.

I didn't know he was speaking to me. I thought it was another one of his exercises to keep me on my toes so I would always be aware of my surroundings. One of those "what street is that?!" spot quizzes. I think it may have been one of his best attempts to connect with his kid who was not into the "arts" as he was.

In fear, I placed my hand on the shift knob with my fingers spread so I could see the 1 2 3 4 5 R grid, do not break his possession. Be good. If you do good, he will not be disappointed.

Understanding that he wanted me to move the shifter while he worked the pedals and the wheel, I was incredibly hesitant. Before that day I'd only read about it in magazines, Road & Track and Car & Driver and Model Builder and the RC aero rag on my stints at the library in the periodicals instead of going to school when I missed the bus because you can't get to Greenbelt from Bowie without missing have the damn day anyway, might as well go to the library on your bike and make sure you're back home before he is and no one is the wiser (fuck it and fuck Eleanor Roosevelt H.S.).

I shifted with my left hand for close to five minutes before he took over again. And that was my first taste. The second was driving school in a powder blue Chevy Cavalier with a stick that was way too long for the shitbox that it was. And the standard minted was the Falcor that I drive now. That was when I learned and am still learning.

Every time that I hold that stick, my dad does cross my mind. My dad and where my love affair with the Fairlady line of sporting two doors began. The way that he would cut through traffic and move through the shift gates was impressive to my young mind. He wouldn't be able to drive my F250 for shit and it makes me laugh. It makes me laugh because if you can pilot a junker with finesse, imagine what you can do with a coupe.

There are times I wish he'd taken the leap to see me outside of the framework of his knowns. We have much in common. I would love to be able to speak to someone who understands the rage and fire inside as much as he knows it and hides it and clamps it and eats it and focuses it and the ways it eats you alive.

I'm never going back to him. He is as welcome in me as he has said I am in him. Big ol' bag o' nopes and it does make me laugh to understand that happy endings are for stories- not history. Consolation prize: he tried and it planted a seed and a passion for Nissan coupes and the design philosophy throughout their years.

My artistes' eye is still there. The lines are classical music if you see its shape. When you think salon coupe GT as comfortable cutting into the wind as whipping around corners, steady as the shaft of an arrow and fickle if you tease it, from its stance to the cut of the A pillar to busy tail lights and sloop nose that can accommodate aero headlight glass or no.

I think back to that day and how I must have looked in the passenger seat with frightened eyes looking at the digital gauges and being thrilled and awed and stupefied at a tachometer that wasn't a dial. In the years following, I was disgusted at the tach that wasn't analog. And then I was enlightened to the tune that dashboards can be removed and replaced with whatever the pilot finds most useful. And then I went away to college and the car disappeared and I remembered that he didn't actually give a shit. For a moment I was his son and for a moment he was a dad. And then he was confused as to why I was upset that the car I cleaned for the better part of a year and got to touch and fell in love with was shipped off for who knows what.

It just... it pains me... he has no idea who I am. He had no idea then and he has no idea now.

I used to think he was just crazy. I still do. I am. I am a functioning adult from his loins so.... it kinda fucking follows. Also why I'm not waiting in line for progeny. Some things should stop. Accidents don't happen without a breath of agency and this time around I can be the eyes he didn't have then. The discerning he absolved himself of.

Do I want to make him pay for what he's cost me: of course. Can I? Yes. Will I? No. He will die in his bubble on his own time. My life is worth more than enlightening a grown child, talented though it may be. Do not attempt to turn a mountain, it will return to the sea on its own time.

Driving the truck, blasting music that is foreign to his circuits, with the windows down... ...he could have enjoyed himself and his child. Us both now in a solitary confinement. I hope he is pushing a standard, but we all know "it ain't that damn likely." With age also goes the tooth for sporting.

///Noname - (Diddy Bop) ~ driving music