best of: April 2003 Archives

in non-whining-about-love related news, i've achieved some sort of navigational nirvana with the individual entry templates, added an expandable ten most recent lyrical submissions section to the sidebar list, & changed the comment form labels to bizarre examples of badly mangled phrasebook french (an activity which had me doubled over in hysterics, yes, i crack myself up sometimes). also i reminded myself that (a) i have a job i love -- yes love, it is possible to love work. can't complain. and also, (b) after years of despising myself physically in the present tense while longing for the physique i despised in the past, i have finally bested the beastly learning curve of my issues & decided to appreciate my self in the present tense & therefore from this day forward i shall consider myself to be a hottie. at this moment i'm having to forcibly resist throwing myself down on the couch & having my way with myself. these are good things, even though my realization of them is a bit belated. it always is.

& so what if i never have another gutrending heartwrenching transposition of head & heels, what if i never fall in again? what if it's just me, my ownself, & my frequent passionate unrequited crushes (which do keep me tingly, even if it is a wistful tingle at best)? what if all there is to this life, what's left of it, consists of only the career i adore & the creativity i pursue otherwise & this newfound affection i have for myself? shouldn't that be enough?

well, it's not. not even fucking close. mostly it's the wistful element alluded to above, that haunts whatever pleasure i derive from unrelated activities, that saps the colors from the best days, that fades my smile even when the expression is joyously justified. it is this wistful shit that must stop. some pathos in the background of me just whispered that the wanting is best stopped by getting, & some weakness in the rest of me accepted that suggestion as Truth & went off on another tangential fantasy against all of my better judgement. as these conflicts went about their usual business of unsettling me, my eyes reminded me how unfocusing exhaustion can be & offered a tantalizing memory of last night's dreams, which were blissful, sensual, loving, & ultimately more fulfilling than anything reality has ever given me & then taken away eventually.

will regretting what i'm lacking now, in spite of all that i do have be like the lesson of physical acceptance, another of the many things i'll end up sorry for the vast stretches of time i spend with it still unlearned, in spite of constant hindisght to the contrary? how much more must i waste before i learn?

within a minute of waking, monday announced itself to me in angry stressful terms & went downhill from there, feeling like the sound brakes make when they're worn down to the rotors & being applied against inertia in desperation, the kind of sound you hear with your teeth.

there was more to the metaphor at first -- it went on to mention the addition of 'in flames' to downhill due to an explosion of a stockpile repressed ammunition too unstable to be used for communication purposes or somesuch. & then it got hopelessly entangled in itself & began to whine piteously, so it was sent off to spend the day in draft status & reflect on its erroneous ways.

whether it escaped or was eaten by the voracious depression i stuffed in there with it, we'll never know. both are currently missing, & while they are certainly not missed, their absence is a little alarming, considering the circumstances & all.

feckless: hopeless, incautious, ineffectual, irresponsible, meaningless, reckless, shiftless, weak, wild, worthless. purposeless. some days the URL is used ironically, on others it fits like skin. & irony does abound these days, just not where the URL is concerned.

this started out with every intention of becoming yet another fetching, feckless rant of the self-deprecating variety, but what's the use? it's safe to say that feck is quite capable of obfuscating the issues as she spins words around her dire circumstances du jour, conveying either an impression of irrepressible whimsy or edgy fragility, whichever seems the more appealing approach at the time. & we know that she often engages in relentless self-revelation as a form of misdirection, hoping that her outrageous candor will garner at least as much attention as whatever it is she's just revealed. & she will do all this at a breathless pace in overlong & overly complicated sentences filled with recursive references & obscure imagery, formatted for euphony first & clarity second, so that her meaning cannot be easily deciphered merely by reading; these statements are meant to be solved for x. in the preceeding example, we didn't even get the euphony, did we? she's in a hurry.

and this business of referring to herself in the third person? it's another technique, as is remarking on the usage of the third person in a tone that rolls its eyes at such silliness. & she'll finish it off with some adorable anecdote about the arguments she has with her cat when the dang thing bangs on the door at four something in the morning & stirs up her insomnia. & then she'll go back to bed & most likely regret this (later in) the morning.

not literally of course.

i have a twix & a newcastle. i have a cigarette & decisions to make. i have spent time being my own stranger, & oh the candy. oh & yes, yes i did this instead of what i should have. can i deduct the temporal expense as necessary therapy? do you really want to know the alternative? thought not.

& soon i'll have only the one job, & this is good. much more of this two of them & it would be all about my brother's with them, did i tell you? / his wife is russian and he / keeps asking me to fill out forms / i have it in my diary / listen, which would bring to mind the time i went home with the waitress / the way i always do / how was i to know / she was with the russians, too & incidentally last night i watched the news from washington, the capitol / the russians escaped while we weren't watching them, like russians will ... (aside: two songs about lawyers mentioning russians. conspiracy? you tell me.)

i've put some poems in the lyriclist, & in doing so said, in essence, 'same difference', which was a nonsense thing my mommy used to say about this & that.

& i want to write up that search function for my lyrics. & can't. have work before sleep & sleep before work & an unknown but now finite amount of completely crazed days stretched out before me & then it will be different. better? sure, sure. not that it's bad now, you certainly won't catch me saying if i had a rocket launcher, some son of a bitch would die. no, that is not a thing i'd be caught saying, and if i ever had they couldn't tell, if we were they didn't know / she might but if he did they can't, you must, I won't.

you know.

things change. sit down sit down / as we relive out lives in what we tell you. once long ago i listened to that in an entirely different state of being & thought how life is relived in the telling, reinvented &/or redefined more like it. & that the past is rewritten in every word, all of them, even these, & therefore there is no such thing as history, at least none that can be known. we don't exist, we eat our time.

i, um, didn't go home last night. matter of fact i was just wandering downstairs at the car wash when youknowwho was getting out of the car to come to work. he took it fairly well, even the part about the sleeping with a guy my daughter's age, whose name escapes me. sleeping i said, get your mind out of the gutter. hmmph.

if a godless heathen wrote a prayer for critical mass, it would be me doing the writing in blind faith hope here. would that i knew what i meant when i typed that, o believe you me. i believe it was about surrender as in let go good god, who could do that? it would not be me surrendering, this much you may accept as fact although you will only have faith to go by - and trust me i could be making this shit up, i often find myself doing that. & by find i mean, discover as in there is an element of surprise involved.

realize that i am an entity possessed by stress & yet uniquely immune by virtue of these forays into semi-conscious surrealist imagery, do you see what i mean? look: various landscapes replete with nonsense & ants. clarity? i could analyze this shit in a spreadsheet & give you ratios, baby. it is this precise, this madness.

again i must mention i've no idea what it is i'm saying or more accurately channeling, as in four beers & half enough sleep for a week or is it more? it might be, there were days i simply did not know where in time i was.

what is this working? with the beer & the vanilla cigarettes & the dsl & the boss & his minions out there melting metal things without goggles? fun is what it is, avoidance of home is another. & yes blogging at work, offuckingcourse i am. there are justifications: again, faith is what you'd have to have in me to believe that this is not wrong. & besides i have the security cam to tell me if they're coming. & i've been otherwise quite busy. just not right this very minute, this minute is a moment & beyond, because i am not home & i have this sweet buzz & these things to reconcile & the sound on this puter doth rock muchly.

life. feels.

fine.

in a winsome whisper
i invite you inside
my story
& offer you forever

the wry curl of my
slow smile illustrates this
prehensile tale as i
twirl it tellingly
around your perceptions
& give you
visions
& love.

& this is limitless love
i give you,
untouched by any
temporal or physical
boundary,
& yet it can be
expressed to perfection
in the flesh, yes.

& yes
of course we are
incapacitated by
the intensity!

primitive rhythms
relentless within us
&
yes, these are
impossible promises
we are making

but they are made
with words & motions
which describe the
gentle curve of infinity

perfectly

as far as i can see.

-(me)
25 AUG 95

when i was young, i called inspiration "muse" & pictured a feminine presence, gliding across the consciousness in a gown that flowed like quicksliver around her, as she brought me words, a line or two like seeds. i believed her benevelence long after she had shown herself to be a fickle bitch; i blamed myself & lavished upon her all i could give, the pretty notebooks & pens i'd buy or steal if i had to, which would be consumed during sleepless night after night, endless revisions in search of her purpose for me. and by & by there came a time i looked back at what had stretched into decades & saw myself foolish through most if not all of it & i let it go. fractionally i wondered what might have been, but on the whole, i was scattered & left in charge of my own purpose.

& so i settled, as did the dust here in this cavernous drafty warehouse here, cluttered with only the most worthless bullshit, anything worth anything had long been sold, stolen, or otherwise wasted. oh, and here's a huge pile of potential (hardly used, no reasonable offer refused).

& so i went about the business of hanging on. i managed. there were more failures than anything, more accidental successes than successful efforts, but somehow things got to humming along, tunelessly of course. numb, more or less, more was better. & then? out of nowhere? inspiraton. returned. unbidden. & my numbness subsided into tingling & i sat anticipating the words that would be given to me, ready to follow, ready to surrender & be led.

the air crackled as he walked in, flashing a greasy smile & smoothing his combover. any doubts were obliterated by the energy, the same familiar force, only intensified by an order of magnitude; my mind reeled with the possibilities. the smell of his pungent sweat punctuated the silence as he measured me with his eyes, shrugged, & offered one word, a question: "ready?"

i released a breath i had no idea i'd been holding & nodded solemnly, hoping i looked the part. he held his hands out, palms up, opened his eyes to mine & waited wordlessly until he saw the understanding dawn on me, & by dawn i mean it spun my world hard around me & then tossed me on my ass on the cold floor. the truth? the truth?

he was gone before i had the chance to thank him.

some days shake me. literally i mean vibrating, approximately 65 maybe 70 khz, not quite entirely steady to the eye, though most of them are averted before they know it, it's misdirection, i do it, & i'm good; well, i manage i ... [this is the part where i nearly really screamed - if i had actually screamed, you'd have heard, oh yes & you'd be shaken too] why?