May Eye Survive (for now)

I'm back. Can't say I'm better than ever. Can't say I'm no worse for the wear. But I've returned from a distracting week. My eye swelled from bacterial conjunctivitis munctasepular visualdronitis. Something like that. It still itches but the swelling has virtually vanished. What a troubling somewhat familiar experience. I've had a sty before, but not to this degree. My initial thought was that I had somehow mistakenly stored some pretzel salt residue in my eye socket. This brought on a extensive attempt to remove the imagined crystal chunks through rubbing, through flooding, through having a coworker search my eye for the morsel. I now know that all of my efforts aggravated the hell out of my brewing eye staff poisonfection. It's funny when I attempt to self diagnose, or even fit my own take into the doctor's treatment. I get lost in this swirl of pretend medical jargon. The doctor on the other hand is much more direct, "yep that eye sure is swelling [pulls up my lid] it's bacteria alright, here's the medicine that should clear it up in a few days, the best thing you can do is wash your hands." Wow. Thanks doc. I gladly pay for that service and much love to the North Seattle medical center for there extended support network to help the uninsured and impoverished in the area. Truly a community endeavor. Makes me happy. But man, my language seems obliterated in the directness of such a no-nonsense doctor (Doctor Jaffee was the name no less).

It's funny to me how I feel much more inclined to consider the role of vision in my life when it's jeopardized. Like when I first woke up and was the swell of my lid. Understood that it was curving over my line of sight. Knew the extent of its puffiness and the need to intervene. The eye spoke for itself all over me. Then as I had to restrain myself from touching it, from irritating that poor vision giver any further, I came to appreciate the lack of restraint I often have when I feel like my body is in ship shape. The tender care and consideration of infection. The greater regard. I even began to ruminate on blindness. Maybe triggered by my own irrational fear that at any minute I would be sightless for good. I thought about it whenever I had a painful, I feel all my eye, kind of blink. Imagining the door to vision sealing shut for good. I started to wonder if maybe this attention to my eye would eventually turn out to be an overall blessing. A lesson in cleanliness sure, but perhaps a new motion towards bodily vulnerability and transformation. That's vague. I haven't found a new way to accept what my body is capable of, like cancerous cells swarming all over me, multiplying me into nothing. No not that. But witnessing a major, uncomfortable movement of a body part from one shape to another is crucial. I mean I was mostly grouchy at first, needy too, just ask my loving galfriend ("no face smoosh kissing you plaguerat!"), and I couldn't embrace the idea of drawn out healing, of restoration. Fix me now. Maybe that's why we are a panicky culture when it comes to illness, we understand doctor's have extensive training and when we get a chance to see one the expectation is a cure, sort of, well a solution I guess, temporary or permanent. I don't know what all I mean, but I do have an appreciation for the potential flimsiness of medicine of treatment. I mean holy hell look at this article about the helpless quandary behind diagnosing Alzheimer's disease http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/18/health/18moral.html?hp

There is so much obvious aging, so much latent illness, so much that can "go wrong" with our bodies. Careful, that'll kill you. How to go about aligning with that dreaded potential? How to turn it into a message of mutability and inevitable disintegration. We hold onto our physical form, it's really our only anchor sometime, solidness makes thought meaningful in some sensational way. Witness and actor in bodily experience. Don't ask me why I watch sports! Ha, all over the place here. My eye is fine now. I daresay I will forget about this eye until someone is talking about eye problems, or I start to feel that seed I mistake for salt brewing inside of me, a new bacterial junction brewing, bubbling upward. Well, I hope I marvel. I hope I smirk at what's inside my body, what is in fact me that is out of control. That is cropping up, that is waiting to turn deadly. I hope it freaks me out, but I hope it feels familiar. I hope I know it's me. The fragile me that hides behind this veil, perhaps a thick dark curtain depending on who you are, depending on your fear, your regard for your self and your skin, your society, but I want to see that fragile me, that reminder of my temporal existence. May I hold onto myself, may I look through my eye while I can! May I feel myself rot away, feel the snuffing out of me looming all around me and laugh! Laugh that I am involved, that this quivering jumble of formed me is always undergoing something new. Never a static flesh!!

Touch Yourself

The meowmeow stretches his curvy leg to his mouth. He hooks his sharp little teeth onto his sharp little claws. Everything about this cat is curves. His legs the suggestion of cheetah. He's all hooked into himself, curve locked into curve. He yanks. He tumbles backwards as he pulls with some force. It sounds enough like toenails being clipped, that shell like clip of a noise, but it hardly resembles that $1 clipping tool we all know how to use so well. RP says that the cat does it because he can't stand his too long nails. They stick to everything. He scratches them on any material resembling a rug. He is gripping, slicing, yanking, scratching. But when he tilts back, when he has a mouth full of claw and paw, it's great. It's like watching the seven year old gymnast perform, as instructed by family and friends, to bend backwards, to put her feet on her head, to turn into a crab pretzel. Contortionist contort! Warp yourself for those who cannot! I love when the cat yanks on his nails. I love the way he falls over from doing it so hard. I like the ease with which he understands that this is one way to do what I want for myself. The domesticated meow defying his dependency with some self reliance. I should still probably help out with his sharply curved claws, but sometimes it's just too precious to behold his own little solutions.

A good friend of mine and his girlfriend used to chew on their toenails. Mostly for the sheer thrill I'd imagine. They both grew up in ruralish America so of course we all pinned this on them as an explanation. Gross, uncivilized, folky sorts. What bodily freedom we all mocked. Sure it's hickish on the surface, but that's so located in how I relate to America. Teeth can do so much, may as well gnaw on your nails on a need to need basis. Maybe we were just envious because there was the potential within our own bodies to do the same thing. They were just demonstrating something bodily we share, they were harnessing it into something to do. Hmmm, I wonder how many times we see things that our bodies have the potential to do that bother us, I mean the things that could harm us our obvious, but what about the physical feats, choices really, that are latent within our current bodily selves, do we see these and unknowingly feel weird about them, distance ourselves from them. I think it has something to do with decorum, what we are expected to do with our bodies. Especially in the public/private sense. Picking your nose, ear, vigorously scratching your head etc. Sometimes I feel like I am choosing to do things with my physical self in front of people so I can trigger a reciprocal physical response. Let's discover new places and uses for our bodies. Let's be cats hooking our selves onto our selves and yanking! That is not just masturbation!! I recently had such a wonderful bodily rediscover, it's only happened to me a few times, but it's a great feeling. There's a little dent directly below my tailbone (for n00bs and for me it's aka directly above my butthole) that is just so precious. If you poured a thimbleful of water on it you would probably overflow that dent like crazy. It's still my own little watering hole. I associate it with water because I discovered it in the shower. Everyone knows the shower is the expected place to play body relearn, to find new things, to also be wary, on the lookout for lumps anywhere. It was intensely invigorating to remember this little dent, I was vaguely aware of it I think, and to trace over it, to feel a sensation of me that's been dormant, waiting to be acknowledged. Perhaps a crude example, but we're talking about what bodies are capable of, and touching yourself in new ways that lend themselves to levels of understanding your own capacity for sensation seems terribly crucial. I want people to say, I need to touch myself, there's something I need to know, and not be expected to orgasm or to be a social pariah who reveals too much. Dunno. Keep on chewing on them nails kitty.

I'd like to end on a future reminder about some writing I'd like to do on faith. I am just going to do a brief list of the kinds of faith I'd like to distinguish: material faith, symbolic faith, symbolic order faith, religious/supernatural faith both of which are loosely tied to my understanding of obligations, servitude-diminishing yourself, definition, fervor. The way I listed them is a sort of chain, the first two are sort of subsumed under the third. The final one and its associations is a reaction to the symbolic order faith. The one I want to write about the most, the one I am most interested in expressing is material faith. I don't know what the consequences of trying to depict or capture faith are. I just know it's something I should mull over and something I should be writing about.

Birth-Whirlpool-Rebirth

Let me start by elaborating on some of my methods. I think people conduct themselves in oddly particular ways, I can feel people trying to be themselves, sometimes they aren't paying attention to one another and their methods shine through, their decisions that most resemble themselves because its the sort of things they do most frequently, it's what they are either telling themselves or keeping quiet about, and by it I mean their daily preferences, the embarrassing rituals, the conduct. I am losing this a little bit. Method. We are capable of noticing our own method and riffing on it, mocking ourselves a little bit. Egging ourselves on to do something slightly different next time. To reconsider. To dispute our own presumed choices, our own so called stylings. It happens every time I write this blog. I think to myself, very quickly, what sort of words to I want to incorporate? What sort of language am I neglecting? And by thinking that question I simply try to surprise myself with my direct effort. This is the living fuel of effort right here, I don't revise these, I just pump them out. My friends and I are sort of talking about what it takes to develop yourself while you are acting it out. When the hesitation and questioning coincides with the production. That's a trick, keeping those two around. Doubt and action as persistent forces in your life, it's like breathing and thinking. I dunno, I just feel that doubt and hesitation are masks I've used when I am being indolent. I want to learn to question my method while making it over and over again. I reread these blog posts, note themes, note emphases, note word choice, notes notes notes, I am a witness to myself. I am also a self detective. I am also the culprit. The exploiter. The rationalizer. It is some treat to realize all the responsibilities involved in making yourself right here right now, ha as I like to say over and over again. What a thrill to take that noticing and questioning and addressing and impacting of the self and sharing it with everyone else.

I am so thankful I can play along with the other people who are right around me. I mean an English major, fuck. This is what I did with a select few of the "great and recognized", the important ones. I studied their making of method in order to meander over to my own. This is just a passing by thought, something to really stare at as it walks past you. Something to take with me and really chew on for awhile. A hunk of cud in my mouth that I can suck on, that I can extract some juices from, it all mingling with my saliva. Swallow some, spit some. It's all hot and frothy, bubbling from that cud of a thought. It's funny how you can sometimes forget that you have a mint or a piece of gum in your mouth. It either shrinks or becomes flavorless. Do something with it. Get rid of it. Move onto another piece. But thought is different in the way I remember things. This blog is a language of gum prints stuck all over my own internet for whoever to see if they want to, if I happen to give them a chance to.

Here's a little inkling of method and ritual of mine to share, maybe inconsequential, but it's mine and it's on the mind. When I go into the work bathroom I have to be prepared. I need a key to access it at all. We share it with the realty office and the dentist. Although the only person I have ever seen it was my boss. Ha, we quickly mumble one another's name and just book it. We are not close to bathroom buds at all. I suspect we won't be. Which isn't surprising or disappointing. I like working around the guy. Anywayyy you want it (better way to say "anyways"). I use my key, enter the baffroom. The automated lights audibly click on. If I have to use the stall it requires some forethought. That's what this is about. It's a monster of an auto flush toilet and it has bested me many times. By bested I mean that I have gone to sit down and it has just fired off a preemptive flush. The toilet swirls its flush over my bare bum. Always catching me off guard that it is going to flush until I am half way into my seat. Sitting atop a hole that is swirling with water doesn't quite do this flush justice. It is a roar. A deafening airplane taking off into the void that is sky. It is like taking ten Halls and seven Ricolas and shoving off the top of a mountain for your first time down a snowy, mogul filled black diamond. It is raging adrenaline in the form of a mechanized, triggered flush. A preprogrammed eruption. In short, it is very uncomfortable to sit above. I have adopted a new method to avoid such a frigid blast of water and air. I stride over to the stall with my long legs, making sure that the final stride squares me directly over the toilet, legs now on each side of the toilet. I am stand-straddling this machine. It's sensor has caught me, but I am not just some passer by, who it thinks has already come and gone, the source of preemptive flushes, I am instead locked into its sights. I can then methodically unbuckle my belt, pull my dance forward and down at the same time in order to avoid skimming them against the white exterior of the toilet. This is probably an irrational fear brought on by the instructions of socially expected sanitary measures. Speaking of which, I wish toilets were found in more colors more often. White dominates and allows for proper cleansing inspections. Once I have got the pants and boxers all the way down I can ease into the auto toilet and proceed as you'd probably expect, ha we'll save that investigation for another time; whenever you are (who are you again?) ready to compare those notes.

That's a method that took some change. I'll change it again before I'm done. I'll take on variations on variations. I'll try to bear in mind my written out stylings, my involvement in the execution. I'll experiment, rearrange. Why why why? It's a sampling of involvement in the development of method that should be happening on every level of who I am. It seems trivial, and I bet you could argue it is, but if I can conduct myself to the level I just wrote above for something on that scale, I believe there is a chance that the real method I am working on, always working on I like to tell myself, will really feel comfortable with itself. Will come into its own and suggest newness (another one of those "my all the time now words") to me voluntarily, aspects of me surprising all of me.

I will spare you elaborating on my difficulties with the coldness of the water in the automated sink, and the wastefulness of the paper I often use to dry my hands. Ha, more parts, more methods, more noticing. Plenty.

Coffin Match

There are so many different people on the streeets. Some sort of a way to feel newness all over again. When I was walking around on the streets today I felt like falling over from laughing so hard, laying down in a sunny spot and just laughing and laughing until someone felt obligated to do something with me. I don't have the stamina to carry out such an imagined version of myself. It would be too hard, I'd try to think myself out of falling over and laughing in publick like that. The reason was what I said before, the people, the people, the differences in the people. Some people look so funny to me, it reminds me of the parts of myself that feel weird and different that I often skim over, some people are squat, like little packages, their features are all rounded and rosy, some people where intimidating sunglasses and have hair that stretched out of them, flows all over their back and torso like the most complex string instrument ever played. I want to convince someone to sit down real still like so I can pretend to play them, pluck their hairs like a guitar. What people choose to wear, or the way they look when they put little effort into their appearance before stepping out the door. All of these facets, they're allll such marvels. It makes me giddy, and I would be no good at telling all the people rushing past me these sorts of things, so instead I feel this laugh surge through me (It just struck me that Saul Bellow's novels are all about this laugh, pretty explicitly actually) and I just want to express it, feel it bubble out of me and pop on the people passing by me, but before it pops they can see through the glossy bubbles, and they'll see what I see, all the funny quirks and adornments, the physical features that make them a single person, a one body, but also humanity hence the mutual recognition. Oh man is it silly or what.

Longing. That's the word racing through me today and last night. What to do with longings. Last night I realized most of my longings are for people I used to have in my live and direct life. My family is number one on that. The way I felt last night was basically what I said to my galfriend, that I go home (there are lots of homes mind you, but home numero uno, my family's home) and I do the things the family want me to do, get shuffled from one familial obligation to the other, I mean I don't mind it, I want to see these people, but it's a shuffle. It's news when I'm in town, I am news. I am novelty. That was how I said it to my galfriend. I feel so dusty when I am standing in front of someone who I now stand in front of rarely. We used to stand in front of each other alot alot and now what? Indirect, overlooked longing. Last night inside my head I told myself that these old memories or models get buried in shallow graves. I am just full of all these shallow graves. On a lighter note, that's how I feel about trivia, it's also how I feel about the books I read. Anything can happen to those shallow graves: zombies can come out of them, I can go into my own graveyard in the secrecy of dark and exhume those memories, look for jewels or clues or just something resembling familiar, but also that graveyard can get flooded, water just rush over it, and then a jumble of memory limbs and chunks of memorializations are just sticking everywhere. The shallow graves are in ruins and I lose some things for sure. I am my own undertaker and I have to rebuild those memories. I am also constantly, NONSTOP, getting new bodies to deal with; I don't think I am the sort of gravedigger who currently has the luxury to burn anything, to scatter it and call it done with. The losing of memory doesn't feel up to me. For now this is the closest I want to get to sketching out the longings within me. They are insatiable, but describing them helps. Talking to my galfriend about how I surprise myself by how much I miss my family sometimes, how shocked I am by where I am and what exactly I am doing, that helps. It catches me off guard, but I am going to understand my longing through these shallow graves for now. I have lots and lots of work to do.

On a quick last note I am listening to my Pittsburgh musical ally GIRL TALK's new album. Not only do I feel like a kindred spirit to him because we are from the same city and had the same radio stations, but right now his patchwork of musical chunks, pop music chunks really, that make up his flow feels like such a triumph of channeling memory to make a new present tense. I am very proud of his new album, it is so clearly moving through so many timelines. His new album ALL DAY is just the epitome of what he's been trying to do all along with his style. Much word props Greg Talk.

The Soup Doesn't Make Itself, but the Ideas of Soup Do

I sit here all warmed up by broth. What power broth possesses! There is something bizarrely comforting about watching substance transform from one thing to another, from one place to another. Witnessing but not grasping. Like if you put a powdered stock into hot water stir it until all that dust disappears and you have broth. Well that powdery dust was once flakes, was once say bone or vegetable or skin, what have you, it's already been transformed beyond us and for us. It's part of the instructions, the taste, the dish. It's just nice to feel faintly aware of that potential, like I said before, as though you are witnessing a sliver of an idea that motions towards so many other forms and states, places and order that you're not explicitly part of. What I am involved in is the slurping of that broth. One minute its in the bowl, a few seconds steaming in the curvature of a spoon, and then poof it's in me, probably doing a variety of things to my overall state. I can divide them with my imagination, I can declare the divided facets, but the feeling of that broth going into you is much more holistic (word choice here?!?). There is the satisfaction of just feeling that broth, understanding your body's needs through its intake. But then there is this other satisfaction that has to do with witnessing and building the stories that enable that broth to end up in that bowl, whose steam is puffing up in your face, loosening your mucus, while a waiter and their family from far away make it all happen for you in that moment (I have been alluding to the majesty of Pho as that was the broth of the day).

The reflection on the creation of broth has just as much matter and energy as you do, as you becoming warmer from that soup does. It's not our job to account for every instance of that soup, it's not our job to sketch out WHAT REALLY HAPPENED. It's our job to play with it, to be mystified by it, but to still understand that its happening, and that there really are things to be noticed that our trying to get your attention, trying to indicate that measures were taken to get you this soup. Not just you in particular but everyone's soup. Feeling comfortable with that feels more urgent. I want to write about urgency, learning to incorporate the insistence to think new things when we'd otherwise just accept accept accept, drink the soup, step out the door, and move on. That's the point I guess, we have to move on no matter what, but it really can be our business how we decide to move on, what we decide to remember, what we decide to involve in ourselves, what moves along with us. I think people can simplify this too much. This felt good, forget about it until you're ready to do something else that feels good. It just doesn't seem that appreciative. On the other hand, making definitions, telling yourself how it really is, I don't know if that feels good either. But trying something different, trying to surprise yourself with what you recognize as sort of there, like the powder becoming the broth, the disappearing enhancement of experience, that seems important, subtle even.

I am warming up to my own noticing. I am tracking it and sharing it, and I am going to try to make people feel the same way about themselves. About sharing what they notice, about the staggering potential for noticing, how it breathes crazy (I mean it, crazy) living, oozing matter into one anothers senses. Imagination and the senses, now that's something to notice and get all involved in, imagine playing sensory communication with one another like it was astral projection. What if I could make you smell something that wasn't there in such a vivid way that it became relevant to what was there, that it became a hidden feeling you could find anywhere. Of course we can say that writing does that so much, but I think we deny ourselves a lot of other opportunities to transport one another. I want to take up that calling. I want to make us feel what we just assume isn't within our reach.

This is broth sure, it sort of does my body good. The thing is we all really know that the soup in front of us is much more, let's just want to talk about it.

The Bell Sounds, Move to Your Next Scheduled Period

What to make of my most recent actions? There's such varied pace to my life. Sometimes it feels as though everything is quick and coordinated. Step to step to step. Google transit embodies this feeling. It's time to go somewhere, take the bus, then stop and sync your body with the cross streets, then wait, then board another bus. GPS World. Arrive at your destination, trust the maps that have been made for you. It was another time altogether when people had to worry about understanding where they were in order to relay it to other people. Now there are just maps, maps outside of ourselves and you follow them to get what you want. That's what yesterdays commute to Thanksgiving felt like. Breakneck pace of following steps, laying out my plan in my mind and carrying it out with my fingers following my own efficiency meter. But while I was blazing and bustling through my flow chart, my instructions manual, there was a comforting feeling that the pace would waver. That I would find a haven of sorts, a place where my orderliness disappeared. Where I was meant to be at ease, to do things that made it clear I was taking it easy so that everyone else could enjoy the easiness they too had settled into. To let it be known that I had arrived and that my arrival meant freewheeling fun. The pace had changed again.

Usefulness. What a loaded word. Most of the people I know (know, yet another mindfuck of a word, makes you love the implied lengths of most things? ie to what extent do I know you until we couple for at least a few hours; pillowtalk is such a weird form of knowing, I wish I could say more on assumed rawness, moments of vulnerability-LATER). Phew, lost my track, anyhow I bet some people around me find the ideas of usefulness troubling. How quickly can you make a sandwich? If you are very quick then you might be of use to my sandwich shop. I will trade you coins for your uses, deal? Ha if only you knew how useful you really were to me than you wouldn't feel so useful after all, ha ha! That sort of thing. Be wary or someone will exploit your skills, your handiness, or better yet your good intentions. That's the Marxist somewhere in me saying I am not just more parts for you to amass. Stay the fuck away, let me think.

Usefulness. There's more to it than that. RP and I were talking today about what to do with ourselves, what to do with excitement, with a challenging outlook, with dissatisfaction. How do you spread your own feelings of newness to people who feel like nothing new will surprise them? People who don't so much anticipate the waves of technological innovation as much as they effortlessly use their iphones. How can you convince someone that you've got a new piece of mind for them to try on? No promises, just a different outlook. What I'm hoping for is something that's gonna shock you right out of your skin. If only we could build new mirrors that destroyed you and rebuilt you over and over again, right in front of you, each new building of you different, maybe a variant of yourself you've seen before, call it a memory, but something new and astonishing to behold. People can be very vain. If they could see distinctly different versions of themselves whenever they wanted to would it excite them? Honestly I suspect not, but my reasons are static, like facebook profile pictures, people have choices to represent themselves anew all the time but the choice to do so just doesn't have a fierceness. What's potential, what's this abstract usefulness when you can do such stimulating and different things all the time. We're all arrested by too many choices, and too many of those choices that could restart us would mean too much energy and attention. Dedication. TOO MUCH.

I am going to ponder how to feel out new ways of being useful. People surprise me all the time, I feel them being startlingly relevant to me alot. How invigorating, how surprising. Of course people are still doing it, I'm always sorry whenever I've doubted you all. You surprise me with your choices, with your well timed thoughtfulness, your understated but deeply social actions, your cautious eye, your need to be here in the new now. Accessibility that preserves intention. What a nasty mouthful, astringent. Like nasty mouthwash that you have some faith in, all about the mouth sometimes. RP is here I am going to cut this off, it's a chunk, a morsel if I'm lucky. I need to think about where style and accessibility meet. Fragments, seizings, ugh, look for more time to make meaning come across, like a megaphone in peoples heads, loudspeakers.

An Invitation: A:"We're Alive!~!" B:"We get it, we get it"

America America. There aren't many ways that make me feel as if I am not American. Happy Thanksgiving. I just got invited to someones for food and sitting and more and talk and birds. I thought that this would be a year of thanksgiving with no one but me. I am thankful for me, ha, but I am also thankful for the me that is involved in more than me. I know that, I am living it harder than I have before, and I feel like I am actively devising ways to be involved with new others. In some ways its all still brewing, still formulating...like making technology mean more in other places, this bizarre interest of mine I can't say enough about, literally, I lack the words, so I use words like involved. Anyhow, there's a yes and no to the way I am living my life in thankfulness for others. But its more on the front of me than it has before. So sure, I am withdrawing myself for turkey. My initial plan being to take myself to a dark corner, a restaurant where the floor is so dark that you can't see below your knees, wade over to a big ass table and say how much $, bah it's thanksgiving, I'll take 6 or 7 of your courses, red velvet cake to boot.

But then a friend throws me a line, a wrench really. Come over and be around your kind! That should be everyones invitation to everyone. I should really be reminding myself to say that to more people, come and be with me, we are chilling on mutual wave lengths we haven't even begun to recognize with one another. I am so sorry that I haven't said it before, haven't worked it before, but oh person I am ready to feel more like we are people together, hence the word person. That's what is so great about it, that we are parts you see, different parts, but we fit somehow, I can't believe it but we do, let's fit this out. Come on over and eat some turkey. Holy FUCK! What a wrench. Little do these so called people know about spewing this stuff over them. I wish I could eat the social parts of the feast along with the stuffing and the cranberry and the potatoes meet giblets, stuff myself on people and just say it, "Boy, I feel so plump after gobbling up your commentary on your week, the highs and lows. I am so stuffed of the way you listen to me, the way I can get you to elicit weird face tics and movements. This is enthralling, almost as tasty as this food, which is also keeping me alive." HAHA It's a shame I just can't fly off the handle in front of someone in such a live and direct fasion, and then make it there turn, and we just standsitlay in front of one another and spout all the stuff that we can find in us, perform it so brutally. Sometimes I think that people are convinced that drinking is the closest they can get to that feeling. But drinking is just a facilitator, if I can do it while frantically typing with a stuffed nose, with enough sustained attention between people we can all certainly enact and witness our lives right in front of one another, all at once!!

I am certainly going to make my way over to an unexpected friends for a feast, I know I would find so much in a 24 hour alone session, thinking so hard about what's now, what's next. But today I am going to live it out loud, right in front of your face (whose? yours you fucker! who's yours? It's everyone, the ready and the unprepared, the still kicking it everyone. Believe me, we've all met before). Happy Thanksgiving, I am going to flood us all with thanks for the weird expressions of now that surround us: the food, the booze, the smokes, the breaths, the parades, the hairs, the snow, the eyes with books and screens and words and sounds and hands, the plugs, the claws, the water everywhere, the smoke, so on, so on , so on, SO ON. SOON SO ON SOOOOOON

So much can be so great sometimes.

MOUFS wit TOOFS

Here's a chance, a window. My teeth bleed and bleed when I brush 'em. I am amazed at how the blood replenishes, that it can seep out of em like that. I try to be light about the brushing. I even try to think about my gums. Slow circle like my dentist uncle says, but the froth can just overwhelm it all. Suddenly I am wildly cranking my arm, shoving that plastic and straw all around my gaping hole. Then you can see the white suds tint in my mouth, the blood start to work it's way out of the gums and into the foam. I just want to spit out right then and there. Want to see all that blood splattered on the sink. I have to contain myself to get through a sufficient brushing. When I look at the gums they are sorta pink and fleshy, we'll call it healthy. That's when I'm just passing by, just inspecting my teeth to make sure they aren't slipping out of my head. Now when I really look, really hold my eye to the mirror and view the mouth, now that's when I freak myself out of myself. I see the indent of red as hell gums, it looks like my mouth is shoving my teeth outward, shedding them. It's a blood red mountain puffing up densely packed in ash, my teeth have a nasty line on the bottom, all jagged and slightly brown and yellow, a subtle line before they rise into my front teeth, little masher things with splintered ridges. The gums that support them look like a zombie's mouth. How shallow is this whole hole of a mouth? When is it gonna give out? The blood stop replenishing till it just wastes away, scabs over and seals me inward? I don't know, but when I brush my teeth it's thrilling, leaking that blood is thrilling, rushing this brush and paste across my teeth, following instructions all while unsure what the hell it means other than mintiness. Now I just need to floss and write about that, then I'll be all good in the mouth.

My Overdue Dish

What energy! Where energy! Phew, I just scaled Filth Dish Mountain. I got to the top, looked all around me, the stunning vista, and then I sprayed it with hot red water, turned it into an avalanche. I slid down the crumbling mountain and looked at what had settled in its stead. Clean dishes, steam and drip, vessels ready to be tucked away, ready to await reuse. I am getting into a dish doing groove, and there's a lesson or some lessons to be found within the practice. First, reluctance. Reluctance is the changeworthy actions killer. Reluctance is what makes Filth Dish Mountain so official in the first place. Reluctance is a disheveled room and a steady flow of diversion. Reluctance is free time, is passivity. It's forfun reading, it's pet-and-bother-the-cat-for-too-long. In short, it's lots that don't feel like lots of change. That's why the dishes in the kitchen sink blow up into mountainous scale. But there is a peace in addressing the chore. That's something to relearn. When I do the dishes now I am all up in that shit. Hot as fuck water that is somehow a friendly greeting, "welcome back to the necessity of the sink!," says the scalding hot water that I rotate my hands through with confidence, sure to not allow my hand to stay steady under it. If I just stood still and let that red hot fluid flow my hand couldn't take it. But I am a living-breathing-raging machine of dish production, movement and focus make it something to learn within. It's savoring the dishes I am making happen. (Sidenote, I am taking a quick break from typing to put on my shoes, I don't need to have my shoes on now, BUT DAMN it feels good to have your shoes on, you feel ready to go, you are buzzing with LET'S GET TO THE GO) I think reluctance stopped me from doing these dishes with such blissful fury. Connotation of my old ideas of chore: task, slump, requirement, burden-hardship, mandate, order, doctrine, would rather not. This is bogus. When I was a dishwasher (clearly my history with the gig allows me to lean harder on Dish Mtn than other old world "chores" I am trying to relearn all the time) I would do it with this same frantic involvement, but I was expected to, it was $$. When I am told: Do this, it's $$, I am all about it, I am docile and exemplary. When it's me on my own, or when it was, I'd be more about how this is my time, no $ on the line, just me, my time is mine to fuck up, let me make a mess and ignore it. I don't want that style of me one bit. I want to scrape those dishes, I want to get lost in remembrances of what were those scrapings, the clusters of minute bites missed that signal the meals the gal and I so lovingly made for one another. I want to feel every piece of dish in that sink, rotate and be thorough, feel the heat, be the movement, make it happen. I cleared the mountain, and it's weird but I think I like the feeling of leveling it more than I like the piecemeal killing of dish hills and dunes. Which is gross. We have a trough for a sink. The build up is spectacular and foul. It carries it's own smells, it's not a playplace for the curious meow meow, it makes tidepools of disgusting bloated cereal and splattered red sauces, like a haunted house electrified with glow in the dark gore. Ha, I might have to figure out my relationship with the dish and its recycling even further. For now my scaling of that mountains is lesson enough to harness. No more reluctance. Appreciation of all the things I do, and the usefulness of my energy. I want more and more energy, I want to redirect it to things that I can make explode in ways that catch the eyes of pedestrians, that wake up the neighbors and shock them. I don't want the kind of energy that helps me down a seventh beer. I want the stuff that has a razor edged new style of leveling with the living world while we still got it. That appreciates our chances within it and thereby harnesses our moments, especially the ones we let slip by like they are just dirty dishes that need to get done. Fuck that cow, these aren't chores, these are ours for the taking and remaking! Reacquainting!

giddy giddy gumdrops

I've got a quiet giddiness about me. It's been coursing through me and I've been trying to share it, which is like trying to believe it. Wandering around the work neighborhood over the last few days has been as woesome and blunderful as my previous account related. Mishaps include a misfire order of tofu at a teriyaki joint...I basically, inadvertently requested to have a package of tofu taken out of the fridge, chopped up, and put on a plate with some lukewarm saucy soy. And just a general purgatory malaise that involved me walking up to one or two closed building, looking through the windows, and imagining being inside them. It's getting a colder so if I am going to keep on roaming like this I need to bundle closer to myself. I like the idea of winter clothes that sort of wrinkle your skin so it's closer to the rest of your skin, self friction. I broke my me pact of cleansing (read no bad things for sometime, say 7 days w/o) and it's mostly cuz I went auto desire. It's that split second stand still feeling of weighing what you want and how you feel, say, I feel hunger, and then letting your brain drift to the quickest most comfy decision it knows, say Subway. And then next thing I know I am remarking to myself on the comforts of savoring italian herbscheezes and the hardwork of a sandwich maker during a suburban lunch rush. Lunchtime at work verges on the awakening for me. It's my most alone and my greatest regard for the ordinary routine of my agreed upon surroundings. Whatever that means. I think it has something to do with the feeling of injecting myself into an "established" community. The Russian Soul Wizard (later) lives in Magnolia and says that children can go about freely there. I agree. My Bartell drugs zombie minutes are spent admiring how kids with some calculated amount of $ just go place to place in their village taking what they want or need and doling out their dollars like the aspiring adults they often unwittingly are!!!

Okay, I've been giddy though. I've felt like my life is more precious than I was willing to let on before. Lately I get seized by obscure, seemingly fond memories of my past: forensics trips, general movement, thrilling nights out with party or hang out obliterated friends...and I take those moments and stop them, imagine that I died right then right there. "Boy," I say to myself, "I sure am grateful it didn't all end right then right there for one of many fathomable reasons. That happens to people all the time, unexpected, befuddling endings and they are just caught off guard and then boom no more catching anything. It, life, is all over." Honestly, and I can't pin it, I keep on feeling this refreshing astonishment that it hasn't happened yet. I AM A LUCKY DAWG. THIS AIR IS SO GOOD. That's how it feels sometimes. I am trying not to be dramatic about these feelings, but oh I dunno, when I am with receptive friends I stay stupid, listen to me, let me seize you sort of things to them like, "I feel like assaulting people I see on the streets who don't seem amazed that they are still kicking it. I want to force them to recognize the urgency with which we are still sharing in living. This mutual feeling will overpower us thanks to my uncontrollable assault upon their living breathing thing and then we will do a dance of life, a precious dance that harnesses the right fucking now feeling. This will make me feel right about this thankful giddiness I am trying to muster because if I couldn't share this "ohmanlife" with others, with context, with social, with language, wit you, then I wouldn't be anything at all. I'd be back at the beginning, and by beginning I mean before me, before uzzz." It's probably worth it to note that I only say the first 2 lines of this to the person sitting beside me. Ha still looking for the muster to mustard this shit.

Final note of the now of this typing: boy do I keep on noticing my overbite when I'm reading. I can feel my mouth clamped down like I'm willing lockjaw and I can feel this seemingly GIGANTIC gap between my down teeth row and my up teeth row. My mouth is so closed, so sealed when I feel it. Sometimes I feel like it's gonna drive me crazy, like I'm gonna take both rows and pull them together, make a perfect, unnerving mouth of straight lines, even matchups. Other times I feel great about it and squeeze my jaw even tighter, I feel that and then I read faster and faster. The feeling of my teeth touching each other has been like a reading powerboost, like I am skimming across the words of the page and one word, "bird", "curls", "bass" sends my eyes flying even faster, a racing game speed ramp, suddenly I am propelled through the story. It has something to do with the teeth. I am not even afraid of my retention.

ferret

I think the day is finally starting to settle into place. I'm surprised I'm even here, blog here, at all. I tried to get at you today, but to no avail. I blame it on the blindside of my fretting. I fretted all the way through the lunch time trail from work to the library. The plan was to settle there and type it out a bit, but I was worried about a covert lunch in the library. A reprimand when a snooty librarian found me tucked in a corned of Magnolia Libraries wooden frame, stuffing my mouth with jellies and cookies. I didn't want to become infamous at the library, I like my brief lunchtime visits. I opted to stuff my pbnj in my mouth as I strided to the library, trying to avoid raindrops with speedy chewy. Walking fast, eating a sandwich, raining, blarghole. I know that's why I was fretting. It was cold and awkward. It's awkward because of the front desk of my job, I don't want to eat lunch in our infrequently used conference room, but I'm gonna now. I want to use the internet freely, even if its the twnenty minute speed click of my lunch window. I won't do more on the work comp other than some strategic peeks at reasonable websites for a reasonable young coworker, read nytimesnytimezzz.

So I get to the library, sandwich in stomach. The library doesn't open till 1pm, my daytime hunger means it's only 12:10pm. The lunch hour is well into its roll to a close. I stare at the windows of the library in my eerie half thinking half nothing style. I can see them working; just notice me and make an exception. I turn around and head back to the command center of Magnolia village. This lunch was supposed to be about $ thrift, but I can't stoop back into work after departing, I fret it out too much. I press the Tully's button and strut in. Waffle over chips or new yerba mate canned cold drink, mint...I go for both, well no. Sec, the water is boiling, and like I said, I think the day is settling, the boil counts with that. Just a sec. Midway there, purr purr wants the leftoverrs: sauce and turkey joes. Delorean sounds like speedACollectiveGrimesHOMAGE it suits me right now, I like to be seized by clapping and swaying.

So I go for both chips and drink, the lady says some lunch, I say no, they're just additions. I already ate the sandwich, this is part 2 I guess. She says $4 practically $5, I say no chips. So I buy the pricy yerba, but it's mintish and something about rainforest redemption...sigh, feels better than just missing $ because I've been up the old fretting. I eat the cookies from the gal at home and eat 'em with the yerba at Tully's...worry, sorry fret, about getting scolded for outside food, so I scarf the cookies. It was cool though. Sip on the tea, read Jane Eyre and then back to the office (I'll save those topics for when they flesh out).

I thought about this spacesiteblog while I was hustling to the closed library, shoving that pbnj inside. I thought about what I could do, I got excited, thought about talking about the rainwalk and the fretz. Then I thought about mentioning how I got excited, then I thought how I shouldn't cuz its hack to talk about all the thinking about the writing you want to do is. Then I thought if I mentioned that feeling of doubt that it would all cross it out and my thoughts would redeem themselves, it's like forcing the fresh out from under the old exposed layers. The outside and insider are just as old, it's just the outsides been airing out or something. Ha nosense, but I thought it was funny, me forcing this already and trying to talk it out inside my head enough to make it interesting to force this kind of writing-thinking. The stove is beeping like crazy, it's time to eat this shit. Sway to Delorean!

privatized mutterings

Today is a day for a renewal of sorts. I'm even surprised and thrilled that this internet dust is still piled together in a recognizable form. It's been awaiting! I feel the ripples of bloggish impulse coursing through me and feel like I should just get this to become a habit. As I can see, my contributions to this blog all those days ago were so meager. Now that I am writing I can wonder aloud, silently, why that was. I think being in school didn't do much. I think that I was too bent on being impressive. That is, approaching myself with weighty expectations, like I was actually a worthwhile stream of factoids and compelling contributions to the digitally reading race...I'm not now, but I am something different today. Then I just cracked open quickly, spent a second reassuring myself that I was a "paper writer" and that I had grades to be got...well I'm not that anymore either.

Today I had a dream that I was sitting in the center of a classroom of small students, their teacher monitoring my presence with the sledgehammer of school appropriateness in her eyes. There were others in that circle, one seemed to be a diminutive girl from Trader Joe's who I'm ashamed to admit was remembered for her stature. We were all to take turns reading a story of our own to the kids. It's been a long time since I felt the need to write a story in the reals (because physically speaking I have become proficient at substituting those sorts of needs with drink, sex, food, comfort, laughter speeeech). But in the dream I had a story ready, a fierce one I'd wager. There was a failed stand up comedian (aka me at 16/17) who doesn't tell any jokes in the story, just sorta gets on and off the stage, and there was his brother, a special teams player for the Steelers. The kind that runs into the guy who catches the opening kickoff, the cork that stops those spare miracle journeys of one man from one end to the other. Little glory. Anyhow, he had cancer, this special teams guy. And in the dream, while my turn to read didn't happen (thanks to my gal's morning alarm) I remember fretting about relaying the cancer of this athlete to the kids. Not because they were Steelers fans, oh no never that. But because of the imagery I was prepared to read(/write in my head while I dreamed it) of the body of this man, who fully knows he has cancer, crashing into those other players on the field. Keeping it to himself while his tumor collides with their muscles. Whoaheywelll that was something to mull over in bed while the gal was pacing around the room getting the clothes on for the work week.

I applied my reflections on the dream to a latent decision, time to clean out the old gourd. No intake of alcohol, drugs, and grease for at least 7 days. Don't know if this secretive decision is gonna serve me well, or if it will occur at all, but I feel this need to shift out and onward. This is the start. I've done some odd things today. Scoured the internet and got excited all over with what I can do with it. But I need to know my hands still have fingers and those fingers still have push. I guess that's why I'm here again (no doubt I can thank the savage mr. rp for now) and why I'm spouting off. I don't need direction, I've got too much of it, I just need fuel. And I need it for just me, I'm not ready to share all these musings, but I know I'm gonna pursue 'em. I especially like the way I fly across the linescapes of an online window so that's where I'll settle for now. Oh and I'm gonna make a tornado, I might even make more than one. Just feel me out Ryan, just try me on again.