Watching "It Might Get Loud" a documentary featuring Jack White, The Edge, and Jimmy Page. Jimmy Page has earned his right to royalty. Screw Paul Mccartney. Page deserves at the very least knighthood. Perhaps I never really appreciated the magnitude and dynamic quality of the Edge's guitar playing, but when you zero in on his riffs from songs like "Walk Away" and "Streets Have No Name" you really see how original the sounds are. Jack White, in my mind, is a dynamo supreme with the ability to create or re-create for himself and those who love music the power of the blues. The documentary itself was well put together because it touches both on the musical influences as well as some of the social backdrops of these musicians and where they come from.

The truth is I'm not sure I care enough about the welfare of students. I found myself employing the Socratic method with trainees since I really feel that the stronger students need to learn to think for themselves. As far as other strategies I'm not sure I have many names for them or would even begin to know what they actually did in terms of allowing people to learn more easily than what is already out there. Basically, if people are going to really master a network of thinking where they are in contact with many people, they need to learn to ask better questions, of the people they are servicing, of themselves. Then there is the whole trial and error method. But I guess it's a harsh self-indictment to say I don't care at all, and probably not true. But you learn the value of detachment quite quickly, of detaching from someone who maybe might not be grasping a particular subject matter. You can learn so much from the way that people react to their own mistakes, their own swirling feelings of helplessness in the process of trying to force the benefits of repetition upon themselves.
What seems more uncomfortable rather may simply be the growing pains of having to watch emotionally those people who are not quick to apply new knowledge quickly. Like watching those cute little mice in a maze going down the same path thinking that they will find the same reward even though they have already had that reward removed from them on other occasions. There is that internal battle that I go through frequently imagining that I am at the root of their demise. I didn't point out the correct information or place the proper tools in their way for learning to occur. If I had been clearer, perhaps they wouldn't be so confused, etc. So you try to find other methods, separate approaches that might stimulate their ability to see what is already there. Plato/Socrates believed that the answers are innate, that they are already apparent to the student, so that it remains the burden of both the student & teacher to illuminate the truth within. No matter how philosophical we get with it. All this mention of learning disability throws a knuckle-curve into the Platonic model simply because sometimes people fall victim to the delusion that they have blocks to learning that cannot be removed, and that they have to work around them, and if they can't it's because they are predisposed to not gaining any understanding. Hence, learned helplessness.
But I am not even remotely that far in that process for anything like that to be conclusive. Not even close, they have the entire industry being blown into their faces successively and they are expected to swallow the entire basket of tricks within weeks. It didn't happen for me like that and I seriously didn't think I would be employed there nearly as long as I was. Sometimes, I still begin to think that it is an entire miracle I was ever passed into the next phase of development but they kept seeing to it that I show up on their doorsteps, ready to work through another day.
The fact of the matter it always seems that when I ask people why they don't like to learn they say they just don't have the time nor patience. It seems patience is the one virtue on which people are short, that and resilience. Ask anybody if they play chess and they will likely tell you it's too hard or that they don't understand the rules. SO it stands to reason that if they don't understand the rules, and can't get beyond the reality that there are rules at all, they will seldom even attempt to play the game.

I met a guy the other day who collects rubies. And opals. Just goes out to various rock quarry sites and finds larger gemstones-- he says-- and stashes them unto himself. I was taken aback by the fact that he brought them in to show me. You always wonder if someone is fibbing you or if you're talking to a guy sitting on a well, ruby mine... I mean if he's got these stones in his possession but hasn't done anything with them, then how wise is he. Even so, I thought of it differently, though my discriminating mind was still wrapped in cynical laughter. I turned the entire thing on its side, and imagined to myself, that here is a guy for whom these stones, ruby or otherwise, were precious to him. Maybe he's looking at the value of such a thing as a stone in terms of the weight of it, market value. It's the value that a given society and industry has attached to it... what you can get for precious stones.... but maybe he just enjoys going to look for him. The idea of hidden treasure or found treasure etc. It is this idea of the diamond in the rough that seems to drive us to gather beautiful things to ourselves, because of its worth to us and what it will afford us.

So this just keeps going on this hypermania I have thinking that the quicksand is eventually going to pull me under. But I don't feel it strong this evening. There's a minor sense of purpose, but I often wonder why it is that experiences that I think will be incredible turn into nightmares. Looming overhead. Why do I even think that? You know that you fit in somewhere in the grand microcosm. You just don't know where... the movie Hurlybuly seems to always come to mind,- Eddie (in a cocaine induced pre-comatose state) played by Sean Penn practically baying at the moon that this universe doesn't care one speck of our lives... I don't want to lose my faith like that, she loves me, I just don't feel it. At any rate, I'm thinking that the priorities I have in line are possibly to finish this training class or whatever you want to call it. Look at a possible school. I'll do it. I'll look at that. I have to let go of the woman on Friday. It's done, and if by some act of wild providence we cross paths again, we'd know what to do. You think it's strange but occasionally there is an attraction that is returned and given back... in the end, it's search for the between. Heidegger, Husserl, Nishida, Watsuji. All those philosophers who examine that closeness between two people, the intimacy between two people you crave... You were out living life. You were trying to and that was when you went off the reservation. Maybe not the smartest of ideas looking back on it now, but you can't hold back anyway. It's killing you. The looking back is killing you. I'd like to find a working a strategy for now. Something other than ducking and hiding whenever presented with a crack in the fissure.

So there is-- and has been since the debacle now 9 years ago in the spring of 2001 when the fit appropriately hit the fan--been the question of energy, personal energy and how to expend and conserve that energy so as to be more productive. Some people have great energy, and I believe I am one of those people but I have always has had difficulty harnessing that energy in such a way that I'm not flopping and floundering about as if I was a fish out of water. I have to look at what is going on in my life, the current trend being several competing goals which are colliding and at times, erasing each other. I should be quizzical about what happens in my life.
I took on this business training new hires, with just 6 weeks of in-class experience how to do my job, which let's face it, I have grown to occasionally contempt, and which I feel is tedious & needlessly stressful. But this is so much like teaching or at least my experience of teaching it is strangely funny. Why I get stressed out during such experiences, the constant dwelling on the idea that some of the "students are not "getting it" which seemingly some are not. They are just plain not where they need to be. But that percentage is small, miniscule really. 2 out of 7 but my perception is that #1 there are not enough resources offered by management to really support this large of an opeartion, i.e. they didn't really think through the whole picture of bring people into the mix. My thought has always been that the powers that be don't know what it takes to really, trully train someone on how to do this particular job. The main function being that of customer service rather than merely filling the shoes of someone who can or cannot work that position.
But my mental position has been one of absolute bewilderment at the fact that I cannot seem to simply deal with the constant barrage of questions, problems and concerns of each of them as they go throughout the day, mainly those of the technical variety. Basically I find myself thinking I have overextended myself and I won't be able to get through it without compleyely engaging in a tirade of epic proportions. But as yet, I've been able to monitor my progress. Someone (CR) suggested that my ability to manage the situation may determine to the corporate world how I stack up as a manager. The thing is you never want to take on the title of manager in any capacity unless are 1) getting paid to perform the fulfilled requirements of a manager and 2) have the backing involved that you might need to perform the duties of a manager. But it begs the question, why do I always feel like these operations would all work if the environment suited me? I want to adapt but I feel like I'm always at the mercy of someone else's "say-so" .

Taking Stock at 12:42 AM. All my life I feel I've been tossed by the winds. It's not to say that the winds themselves have been doing the tossing, but in fact, you have control over what you put in your mind.. Over the information you can discard, in what you keep. It's no use beating myself up for what I've done. One of my heroes in the baseball world, Alex Rodriguez, was a guy who seemed to torment himself time & time again over the fact that he could hit home runs like nobody's business, set records right and left for players his age at his time, yet he couldn't win a championship, and couldn't come up with the clutch play or hit when the time mattered. You may think it a mundane example but at some point, those things that hound you, you need to stop listening to them. Just put them down and walk straight somehow. Too much has been made for me by the fact that I seem to be between planes. Maybe I am. Maybe I'm stuck am on a branch like I feel I am. Like the cartoon character who has someone stepping on his shirt and he's trying to run away or run after something, and he's swishing and falling over his feet.
To say I no longer want to live that way would be nothing but me being impervious to the truth that I know that I may continue in that fashion.

What do I really take seriously? What little property I have, a search for the ideal companion, the fitting job where you make a difference, comraderie, an exchange of ideas. All seemingly intangible things, when they are not in your grasp. In short I'm on the verge of a great discovery or else, another complete and utter breakdown. Going at life hard while chewing on an improbable bullet will do that to you. People tell me to calm down, to relax, just deal with where you are at, but sometimes where you are at is simply unbearable, unacceptable for what it is. I just want to get out, to be free of keeping one foot hovering over the break in case of the dreaded accident. Playing it safe, being calculated about the whole ordeal. So what happened today cannot be reduced to nothing. I made searches, queries, into starting a life somewhere else, made inquiries about what is possible in the immediate future. It's difficult to do without money in my pocket, but it was something I had to do nevertheless. I looked at teaching jons in other states. Weighed the options. I want to get out of Nebraska so badly I'm popping at the seams. That is a fact. Another winter, forget winter. Hope for spring. Be glad with spring.

Conventional wisdom- as it would have it, avoid then the deliberate manufacture of misery. I was sort of knocked on my ass again by a guy 60 days sober talking about the wisdom he seeks from the groups. Where it comes from.... I call it a matter of IQ points. In this case, it may be that the IQ points are extremely high as is. All you have to do is listen to these guys talk before the meeting. Guys who worked in the upper offices of the railroad, bankers, teachers, social workers. Guys who have put in time with the systems, have worked out their lives, corrected their lives and can talk about the world we live in today fluently.

The latest of what I heard this 60 days sober guy was rehashing an image of a man in a rocking chair, patiently simply waiting to say that lightning bolt phrase out of the blue that you need to hear. Problem is, you have to be awake for that statement, you have to be awake and ready for anything, you almost won't even notice this guy but then he'll give you what you need to hear at the opportune moment. The other part of it was Tom, the union bricklayer, who's made his way into the business management side of the industry, told the story of a guy who made a crash landing in a field, and struck with the approaching prospect of catastrophe on an epic scale, namely the prospect of certain death, his skill set entirely kicked in-- and he knew what gears to mainpulate, what levels to push, intuitvely he applied all his knowledge of airplanes in an instant in order to guide the ship to safety. That that is what we come to rely on in sobriety. Those sudden moments where we intuitively know how to handle the situation and guide ourselves to safety. How we elude sudden disaster and are saved. With prayer, with experience, with an out-network if sorts. And get through it.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123065247

NPR- story about man with transplanted heart

Probing the Question

My good professor friend once posed the question,

Would you lie for the sake of the poem?

I replied what good would be in that, the word is mighty powerful.

He asked, What is that guys like you and me are after? What do you think
we're putting in our time for, what is it that we are trying to do?

I hesitated and muttered sheepishly To tell the truth, word for word,
and tell the tale no else has heard.

To that he said, That's a fine & good answer, what's been fed to you to spit back.
But if that's all there is then details really don't matter. Go and be a philosopher.

Because there's a thousand people who've heard a thousand stories
just as many as you can tell. And yet, the poem will survive no matter which
way you tell it, whatever its spin.

That's why we have copy printers & zip disks, so no matter what you come up with, there will always be a spare.

But the font will shift when you're not looking, when it's restless & irritable,
It will scoff at you like the lover who outclasses you,
it will ask to see other people so it can experience other avenues &
give you you the age old line, if you love me you'll set me free & I might come back to you.

It will tire of your moralizing, your rigidity, your thinking in the box,
it will imagines vistas for itself, possibilities
that you have failed to see from lack of discipline.

Then, with the desparation of losing your grip on it forever,
you will begin to make up new names for it, you will teach it foreign tongues,
you will dress up with flowery speeches , cover its cheeks with thick rouge,

And prop dark glasses over the lines of its face.
& then, my friend you will LIE for the sake of the poem,
lie for the SAKE of the poem, and whether it kills you to see it live without you,

whether you scream through the doors it keeps opening for you,
or you take up the bottle again, promise it a villa in the Greek isles but

that thing will live without you, and will find life after you & for THAT, you will lie for the sake of poem,
because the lie is the sacrifice, because someone did it for you, & others may need to hear that lie,

More than you need to hear what you've always known was true.

writ.

It should be noted that the poem
came before the poet,
somewhere in the public registry.
They should place asterisks, write
in felt-tipped pens, or exchange fiction
for bold-faced, or italicized facts
in encyclopedias, not only to be streamlined
into the philosopher’s endless jabber,
but plain wisdom, like the sand bars,
or the egret or the daffodil, the stalagmite
maybe or your grandmother’s canned
beets, swirling in a sour sauce.

The message, likely, has been in stones,
predating the hieroglyph or the rune,
it has been reinvented with each set sun,
or eroded with the brine & granite.
It has staggered down the cobblestone rows,
black blood scabbed on its lips,
while the maggot preserved it through
the straights of plague, avarice
& brides undeserving of its love, & still
besmirched by the jewels which
might have stained it to gold worth
less than the leather of a pauper.

You that own its veins, never ask
to cauterie your wounds: your blood holds firm,
and you should be awake when
your messenger arrives with the mail,
you should startle at the code of the letters
In its address, the sound of it slipping through
the slot; you should hold all incoming calls.
Draw the blinds, wrap a drape around your bones,
and beat eggs & butter in celebration of its arrival.

Don’t be afraid to wander outside the city walls,
buy horses, the prize, thrifty ones, born to flight,
or a gondola with demons to its bow, a pack of dogs,
Don’t even be afraid to take the tarp to the inlet
off the mainland, forgo the pallbearers,
your disappearance may go unnoticed for weeks,
Maybe you will not need the ferryman,
or warm clothes, sweaters & mysterious cloaks:
go where the message drags you— if you’re lucky
enough you will find her naked & amnesiac,
her breast swelled out for the torso.
Her lips longing for medicine, her wrists
poised for the wrench of your bloodletting.

You will know it as a throng, a hum
through your nerves, like the scorpio unmooned,
Like a sting through your heart,
It will not relent: it will remain with you
through your molting, through the cancer of seasons;
It is rising through you, even as her loins may offend,
You have chosen to love her nonetheless,
because you are greedier than the hotel bill
might suggest, more savage than when the maids
come to clean, when you’ve broken her hips
because she asked you to, you will grab her hair
and huddle between her thighs until the lights
go out from the tone of her passion.
It is like that when you have reached her hemisphere.
It is even unlike the sexy mysteries of the moon.

Somehow, you should have known that the message
was speaking to you coming out of the womb,
stretching your mother’s loins, hungry
for the basting of light, the sterling sound of the world,
The angry or curious voices colliding
with the novelty of anything but your own heartbeat;
your message was first heard in that heartbeat,
The same sounds as your body coming into itself,
It was the persuasion that you move into the electricity
of all that breathes, joining the conversation
of so many other voices, as whales, as the sea,
as the lightning, and moons, all dreaming with you,
amid the ceremonies for the dead, the script
of scrolls which will edge you through the nightmare.
The physical terror of walking on your feet,
The stark horror that the mortician will clean the blood
from the flesh of your extinguished skin.
After the rage of your extinguished skin.

There is a theme in the incredible message
that the poem came before the poet is a relief,
like the jolt of an airline, the ambuscade of winter,
like the air raid of sleep, the burn of holy wine,
Like the angle of a swan dive, the first cut & scar,
That we overlap with the race of the poem to its death,
that we are the skin & stink of this incredible message,
It is an exchange of breath with that unutterable thing.

Something that was said at the Tuesday meeting last week about the concept that maybe we're supposed be here just to be here & now. For the next man. Which I'm totally in agreement with, because essentially that is what the ultimate fulfillment of the twelve steps seem to be if we are indeed able to create a relationship with a Higher Power & do his will, then it seems that in order to continue to foster that connection, we must work with those about us to maintain a connection to the spiritual. So, the thought was this though, that so long as we assume that our job is to be here for the next man, that we remain "around" because of the fact that we should be here for others, and that in our current state we are in an utmost condition to be of helpfulness to others, we forget that our individual primary purpose is because we have the condition we have. That will not leave us if we are to believe anything that medical science proves about the disease itself. We still have the cautionary states of mind that keep us indisposed from experiencing life on an even plane. And why is this, except that we have previous histories which have dictated this to us, that our experiences with abnormality have changed us from the luxury which came before we ever knew we had a flaw in our condition. There are certain things we have experienced which leave us in a state of unknowing about our future so long as we choose to ingest alcohol or drugs.

Let us not be so drained by the gravity of our personal experiences that we forget the fundamental effects of love on the nuturing of our souls. We are not to be attempting to possess anything that is merely an emotion filtered through our minds, but continuously perpetuating it by the acting with the gift of our spirit.

My Son Volt Greatest Hits Album So Far: 1995-2009

The best band in the world for road trips, hands down. So I got stuck on 1-29 with snow falling down, glaring at the taillights in front of me. I got tired of hard-driving rock n roll, properly stated, and remembered that I had all my Son Volt albums still with me and thought I needed to get back into the Jay Farrar mind set since I had some time on my hands, and the road was still ahead of me. And I have to tell you, they took me home. So this list was my effort at narrowing it down to the best 15. (which I ended up unable to do) And this was not easy because I pulled out my absolute favorite. Then, I turned my focus into ranking so I whiddled it down to the barest essentials. This is even more difficult, you have your truly great timeless songs and mere pearls of musical excellence that Mr. Farrar is perfectly capable of crafting out of sheer effort-driven genius. Thank God for real you don't have to do this, you can take it all just as it comes.

With that I created this list,

Tear Stained Eye (trace)
Methamphetamine (search)
Left a Slide (Straight)
Down to the Wire (acd)
Live Free (trace)
Jet Pilot (okemah)
Afterglow 61 (okemah)
Action (search)
10 Second News (trace)
Cocaine & Ashes (acd)
No More Parades (straight)
6 String Belief (okemah)
Dead Man's Clothes (tremolo)
Wheels Don't Move (acd)
Creosote (straight)
Bandages & Scars (okemah)
Strands (tremolo)
Highways & Cigarettes (search)


Honorable mention: The Search, Out of the Picture (Trace), Been Set Free (Straightways), Mystifies Me (Trace), Flow (Wide Swing) , Ipecac (Okemah), Circadian Rhythm (Search)

This is a method of discipline, it's meant that way anyway. I woke up today, I had laid out a few things for myself the night before, which seems to help. I get off track frequently in the morning. Lately, I'm too entirely obsessed with my appearance, or fear that it won't shake what I hope that it does shake. It's been twelve years since my last drink, officially. I staved it off and I'm glad I did. Why? An image matter. Sally & Bob both had birthdays today, Sally 2, Bob 13. I would have been 12. So it was an image in thinking I might have mixed with the others. Let them have the limelight, I figured. I didn't want to get my chip anyway, which is a sign of my current state of mind. I'm haunted by this whole experience of going out with someone at meetings, because now I think every move I make is telegraphed. Like this girl knows exactly what I'm thinking. Like she thinks I'm a zero and therefore, anything I say is feel of crap. My life, how wonderful. In the telescope of my own mind, my life is seemingly undesirable compared with those around me...people who 15 years ago I wouldn't desire their life worth spit. I walked into the rooms thinking I had fallen from grace because I didn't go to Syracuse University and hadn't yet published a poem in the university magazine. Never mind I'd gone completely insane a year before. Never mind that I had made an almost complete comeback from being given Thorazine to calm my nerves enough to be in therapeutic groups. It wasn't that bad but it had been bad enough.
So today was anticlimatic because I felt like I wasn't matching up. I had nowhere to turn seemingly. I stood on the porch trying to look unaffected. I am affected, instead. That's the true reality of the situation. Why it plagues me I have to look at again. I guess it's the whole thing I keep saying. I'm not living well with others. I act erratically from time to time. Like tonight, I'm afraid to look her in the face because of the rejection I felt a few weeks back. I went farther than I know I should have, trying to force a response from someone, now I just don't know what to do, so I do nothing. I smile. I act kind but really I just want to make her feel something like the hurt that I felt by just being tossed aside. This is resentment. My pride wounded. My personal relations affected. I could say that I was paying attention which I was until that pluperfect moron. started talking emotively about how he had gone out of his way to talk to someone "not like him." Hold yourself up as a fuckup and people applaud it, they talk about the way that they hate who they are because they... well, anyway, I'm sitting there and thinking this has absolutely with the topic at hand..and they are straying from an entirely viable topic. Something pertinent.
So something has crept in and stolen my paradise. You can say that you allowed it to happen. But I didn't allow myself to get affected, I just was. I was excited, and maybe wrongly so because at the time, things didn't properly make sense. But out of pride and ego, I went after something that couldn't be forced. I wanted someone to notice me, so I went after it. One of the reasons I shrug away from the social scene there is because it smacks entirely of being on the in-crowd. Christ, even Bill suffered feverishly from this particular malady, and he did not parade it as something that was a sought after virtue. Of course, it's natural to desire camraderie. It happens at practically every meeting you'll ever go to. The clique that forms. Truthfully, I probably would fall more in line with the gang on Wednesday, the real freaks, the social niggers of the lot. Not that I am, I just have always struggled with where I fit into the mix. This is a matter of feeling. A feeling of fear, a fear of being not quite what others are looking for, despite myself. An intense and innate desire to connect, and prove myself. It's as if you have to prove yourself. And I've always climbed the mountain to where I can display my ability to measure up to others standards. SO I can fit in. So I can be a proven commodity. Earn your way to the top. So this is what I find myself doing now. And because you take yourself so damn seriously, people see that. They see right into that shit and the natural inclination is, for that kind, for that arena, to just let you be. Because you're so damned use to trying to make others look your way, and if they do, seize the opportunity as a sign. So if they look your way it's a blessing, but if they don't then you are accursed. How are we ever going to survive the daily ups and downs with that mental attitude. The emotional rollercoaster of trying to please others and keep them happy with you. Of wanting to be adored at all times.
So this is what is happening now. Mostly because I simply want to keep the party going even now.

Just haven't found it very rewarding...which isn't totally true in the grand sense of how it's said. After thinking about this for a few moments I realize the selfishness of such a statement but I'm developing a bit of bitterness over the last couple weeks. It stems from the recent situation where yes, I met a woman who rocked my world. Rock n Roll Jen. And that was a lingering flash in the pan seemingly. I think she just wanted to go out. And that was it. She wanted to have a little fun and go out with a guy she knew & who was maybe safe? Enter me. Didn't help that I kind of looked at her like a rock star. I mean I know it doesn't benefit either one of us to look at it that way. But yeah, I put her on a pedestal and have for a long time because she has all the characteristics of what I like in a person and in a lot of ways the person I want to be more likke.... I mean, she's not perfect, she can't be. But at the same time, it was like maybe the green one's coming round. Because like TJ said, I'm not looking for a perfect woman, I want someone I'm attracted to, someone I feel comfortable with and ultimately, and more importantly, someone who is interesting. I worried for a good 24 -72 hours about whether I was interesting enough. Hell, I've worried about that since I don't know when... you just never feel like you're interesting enough for the rest of the world. Not for potential employers, not for your social circles, not for the women you're really interested in dating... but you keep going along as though, maybe by some mad circumstance you are going to meet someone in the right place at the right time... etc etc. People say well, why complain about them? It just hit me that actually there is no point in complaining about them... it is what it is and really, this is still about pride for me. This is still also about self-image. About how I view myself versus how I view the world. Maybe we just need reminders that it is okay to just let things roll with the punches....
For instance, it was actually good to hear John say that he was doing okay despite his recent escapade with joblessness, well, really the bedevilments, in general that he was really over it...things did change for him... he found some temporary work that was flexible and paid well, and even got to buy a new car so he could have transportation when he needed it. But he seemed to have gotten through a hurdle and decided he wasn't going to let pervading circumstances determine his present happiness. What makes him happy is hard to say. Not really my place to say but he has actually been on the down side for a long time, and I recgonized that I wasn't always the supportive friend I could have been for someone in that place.... it isn't easy I know when you're in the muck... I think I have been suffering from that old feeling like the shoe is going to drop. Really drop. We live toward distraction of that anymore I think... the fear of what's going to come or what might not come... the fear of what is possibly going to crash down around us... whether it be the ceiling coming down to the tune of thousands of dollars, the microwave exploding and starting a fire in the kitchen...

Blue Light Lounge Sutra For The Performance Poets At Harold Park Hotel -Komunyaaka

the need gotta be so deep words can't answer simple questions all night long notes stumble off the tongue & color the air indigo so deep fragments of gut & flesh cling to the song you gotta get into it so deep salt crystalizes on eyelashes the need gotta be so deep you can vomit up ghosts & not feel broken till you are no more than a half ounce of gold in painful brightness you gotta get into it blow that saxophone so deep all the sex & dope in this world can't erase your need to howl against the sky the need gotta be so deep you can't just wiggle your hips & rise up out of it chaos in the cosmos modern man in the pepperpot you gotta get hooked into every hungry groove so deep the bomb locked in rust opens like a fist into it into it so deep rhythm is pre-memory the need gotta be basic animal need to see & know the terror we are made of honey cause if you wanna dance this boogie be ready to let the devil use your head for a drum

I'm not sure what's hitting me right now... it feels like this blazing force, like a comet that surrounded me and has been sweeping me away from this dimension. It is as if I've been drawing people into my circle, like I'm a magnet (no, not a chick magnet but yes, at times) and the people I want near me are coming near me. My motives are terrible. I think about how I was a seeker, and how I simply went after what I wanted and either it was granted or not granted. That simple. To some extent, it is still like that with me, but now it's something different. Either you believe in divine power or you do not. And if you believe, as some do, that that power is really driving the bus, then you wait for lightning strike, and if you believe that way, as some do, then you realize that lightning doesn't strike more than once. But if you're in a good place for things to come to fruition lightning strikes all the time, and if you're ready you can take advantage of the brilliance of what's being created around you. My motives are terrible, looking indirectly for personal gain, I begin to question again my own understanding of human relationships. Who is a friend? How does a friend behave? Isn't it more than simply enjoying people's company but furthering the relationship by offering up whatever you have at that moment to give someone a hand, to really help them, lend them an ear, listen. Or it could be they are looking for support, they are looking for you to validate their ideas, or to write off their worst fears as foolish, because they have an inherent worth beyond their worst fears. This is an offering that you can grant to a friend. I've never been exactly where I want to be more than I am right now. Probably when I was 15 years old, surrounded by good friends and fielding good rapport, I struggled with that, I struggled with success, of being liked. Even then I remembered what all of it was for, how or why i deserved to be accepted, when I had never been accepted for anything. When I was rising out of failure, and instead of shrinking back into the background, I chose the higher ground, which was to use it for decadent gain. Not so much as it presented itself, but still, I thought suddenly I could have it all. What disappointment. Because I ceased just being as I was, as being exactly where I wanted to be at the moment. I asked for more. I went out and grabbed at it, and ground the links into the dust. For more. I don't want to ask for more right now, because I seem to be in a place where I'm just in the middle of the whirlwind, not really understanding it all, but knowing I just don't want all of it. I couldn't believe when a woman I have long had an affinity and respect for just broke over her own lines, and asked me too hang out with her. It took me by surprise entirely because I haven't been expecting much really, I just know good things are happening when I'm patient, when I stay in the moment and open myself up to those things. I don't think of this as forever, not by any stretched, but it's an opportunity to exercise what seems to be working for me, and that's to try to be myself as best I can. To try to bring out the good in people, or bring out the personality that they want to display, to comfort people even if just give them an environment with which to be comfortable. It's what I absolutely love right now, this experience of being able to step out of my comfort zone even if just for a moment, and go with what I've got.
The antithesis of all this is I'm just a people pleaser. I don't want people to be mad at me, I don't want them to not like me. I'm obsessed by this possibility and yet, every day I talk to people who seemingly do not care about anything but their own agenda... even working at a job, which pays them much more than I will ever get from my current position, they still think of how to wrap everything around their wants & desires. This is the way of the world for (most?) I don't keep a planner, in fact have never in my life kept a planner. Nor have I ever felt I needed a planner. Maybe now it's getting close to that, but it seems like a female thing. An obsession with knowing where you are going. So maybe it's good to begin planning things. We all know plans fall through. My plans certainly fell through somewhere between 2008-2009. The whole fucking thing just split apart... I couldn't think out three weeks at all. Right now, there is no need. I do go where the day takes me. Sometimes I plan out a couple days, I determine a weekend. I keep appointments (doctors, therapists, concerts, vacations) and if people ask me to outings, I arrive. I'm terrible with birthdays, which is odd because I'm coming up on one. What if everyone I know forgot my birthday, weddings are the same way, and what if everyone forgot or simply decided they didn't want to go to my wedding.
Anyway, more and more, I am seeing that this life is about doing what you want. I am frightened about the next step for my career... As I took this shift which doesn't have me go into work until 10:30 in the morning, I stay up late and wonder about where my life is headed. About what the next step for me should be. I almsot had a melt down at work today because of lack of communication, letting emotion creep into the work where no emotion is really required. I'm getting sucked into the drama of the vicissitudes of working the rat race. And yet, that is what this enterprise requires. I hear it every day where people are getting involved in the traveller's bullshit. You knew this when you signed on, is what I think. You complain about criss-crossing the globe, eight cities in two weeks and you don't even see your own bullshit. The bullshit in that place is so thick you need wings to get over it. But it pays well, certainly. It pays well and I'm not clamoring all the time for how I'm going to get my next load of groceries.
So what, me worry? And still I can't separate from that idea that if I am expected at all times to have my shit together then why shouldn't they? If I live with the cost of my inadequacies, why aren't they? Get a clue and call me in the morning. That's what I think. That's where I find myself, insufferably... I am in a place where I think too much without much provocation. I can't "help" it, so I begin to think. Even so, the job is not a long term consideration because I have this alternate plan, which is to gather up a plan. I had this lightning shot this afternoon. I'll get a job teaching in Amsterdam. My hometown. The place where I'm from but have never been in so long. My belief that we all come back to where we begin. Maybe I don't live in town, maybe I don't work in town, because wouldn't that be even better?? Because then I could take the Thruway to work or go out Rte. 30 and head west to some other town and see the sign that says Utica 57, that I grew up with. I wait out the winters and own a small house somewhere in town and know all my neighbors. I'd start a group there. New York. And I'd have summers off and go down to the City and catch ballgames at the Stadium... it was an idea. Like Atlanta. Like Jacksonville. But then came the notion from somewhere else, it's not where you are, it's who you're with. Sometimes the truth. Sometimes a lie.

WOW... The closer I get to my birthday, the Scorpion's tale starts to uncurl.

"It may be difficult to tell if you are looking into your future or into your past as your personal history becomes jumbled with your dreams. Avoiding making any major decisions today is probably a good idea, since your perspective is a bit distorted by your subjectivity."

His mind was at it again, without defense. He didn't know where thoughts came from, whether they welled from some dark place in his subconscious, whether they were caused by chemicals that lurked in even darker recesses of his body. He could almost picture his liver making a hiccup and blurting a small stream of bile which eventually made its way to his brain, and coagulated there. End this, evade other things, disproportionate perspectives. If everything he knew about his condition was true, he had a disease of perception, meaning that he saw the world through a convex glass.

He knew he was no different from any man who ever walked the face of the planet... but some men knew their destiny without batting an eye. They never questioned it, some men never even looked into the glass of tomorrow. But, he had to wonder whether others had people around him, the females wanting to know what tomorrow would bring, or the next five years, the next three months and no sooner. Could we see each other together? How was he supposed to know in any respect? Just trying to make it through the day was the unanimous response, and it seemed always would be. It seemed. Like he could never make it past the end of the week. He'd plan to see shows. He'd plan vacations, but the filler... the filler was for the present...unfilled. You could color it in with crayons. He seldom made commitments ahead of time, because, well, you just never knew.

He remembered driving home from a friend's house during the late summer of 1994, the thought crossed his mind that he had the rest of his life yet to live, but nothing like what he had been through with 12 years of schooling would ever restrict him again. He could be who he wanted to be. But there was a sagging inward. Who else could he be but what he had always been? How could he proceed forward? How could he get Beyond... he didn't know, so when you don't know you start to think that the best option is to wait, wait until the answer finally came. Nothing about searching but waiting for the thing to just be placed into the plam of his hand. 15 years later, the philosophy hadn't totally changed. He'd been averted into believing that you had to reach out and take what you want to. Just don't be disappointed if it doesn't always yield. But he had to try. He had to put some mustard behind it.

So there's still an element of that befuddlement still in the way he thinks... he had a concept that worked for him for a while, a way of keeping his head about him, his wits... he imagines himself walking on the side of a country highway, the kind he was used to seeing in his early days visiting upstate New York. They wind around and get hidden by trees, but all that is of no consequence. Instead, it was the sensation of cars rushing by, the wind whipping in the back. See, the truth is that he has no more an idea of anything that's coming than anybody else. The smartest, most insightful people may be able to predict what will happen given a set of circumstances and maybe they can predict with some kind of accuracy, but they can't account for the right or wrong people showing up at the right or wrong time. You can never truly account for that and why would you? That would take all the pleasant surprises out of your life, and then you might as well perch on a wheel and start walking... So it is with watching the cars go by, you just have to let them go, without any warning, no matter which way you time the pattern, the cars just come by, but the only thing you can choose to do is watch them as they continue down the road... or not pay them any mind, just the red tail lights blend into the scenery and the sun continue to set and the cool breeze begin to pick up, the air dense, the crickets loud, the weeds rustling and the pines, and the pines....

This ordered universe, the same for all, no god nor man has made, but it ever was and is and will be: fire ever living, being kindled in measures and in measures going out. Heraclitus

Labor Day. Never aptly named in anyway whatsoever. I am laboring through my labor... this is hardly labor, and no, I am not just making a play on words. Dave Marty found an old poem of mine, Killing Roaches with Strunk & White's Elements of Style... a poem which grabbed its first readers mostly due to its title. You understand fundamentally that the title of a poem will always grab the reader the most, because every one who comes across will be interested in what it has to say. And whether or not you have had anything to say about the topic. Or what creative energy you have pooled to force people to think. So what was the deal behind Strunk & White, it was about my first true feelings of turmoil, about struggling as the common man struggles, about falling from grace into one's own questionable decisions. But there was always a controversy around whether roaches were either metaphorical or real, in which case, the autobiographical reality was that they were very real. I can still look back at those hours of dread, coming home to find those amber colored insects perched on table tops or loping their way along the carpet... and the book which allowed me the most flexibility in terms of range and (how else can you call it?) flappability... long and taut enough to create a window of impact that would obliterate the dirty, sandy creatures... But even heavier-looming was the collapse of a long wonderful relationship I had with my ex-girlfriend... a relationship I had single-handedly dismantled out of the selfish recesses of my mind...

having this new shell of an apartment, a place I was at once both proud of and equally terrified of living in, I wanted to enjoy my new-found freedom, devoid of any real drawbacks... it's startling to think that any women besides those thoroughly invested in me for the long-term would have dared to come into that place. The ones that did were brave... even so, the line "the rift wider & wiser" seemed to fascinate Dave just as much as it did me... the actual writing of the line from the beginning seemed to me a cop-out. the obvious connection was the growing rift I had created, one of a mild alienation between myself and Kate, but the "wiser" connection was that both of us knew exactly what was created there, even if we might have said otherwise, no matter what new oaths I seemed to try to create to make her think that it wasn't so. But while reading Paradise Lost over the winter, as I did so with pleasure, I made the connection of being forsaken by God due to my actions, and condemned into the land of Nod... that atmosphere might not have been mistaken for anything else, dark brown muddy walls, likely painted so to cover up the gaudiness of the place, so that everything blended in unassumingly.

Strunk & White was my shield from that unrest because I cared little for the book. It was my personal version of J. Everett Pritchard that Robin Williams character spoke of in Dead Poets Society, because I never once felt the need to refer to it in order to write scholarly essays... elements of style . The style was there maybe in form but without content. I made it eleven months in that rotten dungeon of a catacomb, with the cockroaches, the spiders, and eventually, the bats. That was the beginning of the end for me, when the bats showed up, no doubt rabid, but also fearless as the one that swooped down, likely disturbed by the "sound" of human beings, maybe the scent of a potential prey to them. But there was also the one on the grate which clicked its talons as it readjusted itself on the metal meshing inside the door... it was straight out of a horror novel and it would consume my waning hours with terror for the next few weeks, and to a lesser degree until the time when I departed some months later... the lease may have been for eleven months, but I turned over the apartment to Christine Gantz, who likely decided shortly after moving in, that she too needed to vacate the premises as soon as possible... One can hardly blame her. It was no place for a woman of her stature, solitary and fearful, to spend long days especially during the summer, no matter how great her desire to "rough it" in the same manner as I did. So she moved on, and no doubt, the place stayed the same... it certainly couldn't have been much more rectified than it already was.

The man upstairs from me listened, I think, to rap music with his wife/girlfriend and their child who cried not constantly but at inopportune moments it seems. One morning, as I got ready for "working the skinny tie" my door opened hastily and the man from that apartment ambled in as if he, in fact, might have lived there. He looked up after a couple steps into the door, and saw me standing there, in the middle of buttoning my shirt. He apologized for walking in, saying that "he didn't know anyone even lived there." I found his statement somewhat plagued by consternation because even if he didn't realize that anyone lived there, what might his purpose have been for walking into an abandoned basement aprtment except for bold curiosity. I only looked at him, mouth agape. Did I need to worry now about strangers passing into my zone unaware, or unthinking about any consequences aurrounding the simple act of walking in, unannounced and helping themselves to unclaimed space to do...precisely what?

At any rate, the humming Emerson was a symbol of the lone creature comforts about the place... I used the refridgerator but it possessed the tendency to overcool and sometimes freeze the items I had stored within... it was not uncommon to come in and find frozen milk cartons on the top shelf, ice shards having formed where the milk should be. I seldom used the shelves, because I was afraid of reaching for a plate only to find a bug attached to the bottom, which would incur me to throw it against the wall. So it went without saying that I kept plates and cups in plain sight, out of the path of hidden insects or so I thought... there was a closet toward the back of the kitchen for storage but I never used that at all... most of my groceries went on top of the refridgerator where I thought it might be safe from all impending intruders. So fear & loathing overcame me... a fear that I would be attacked or caught unaware by unwanted guests. That spine-tingling sensation that I was being watched or on the verge of being singled out. The more I tried not to think about the bear in the corner, the harder I prayed that it not be there should I dare to look. So that was the spawn of Struvk & White, the thick wood out of which the whittle came... a relic of the time when I fell in love with poetry again, as a means of transcendence. Pure experience made surefire again in the hinterlands of the page...the method by which I made sense of it all. By which I felt an inkling of control, immortalizing my plight of killing roaches with pleasure, with disdain, thrashing aging slices of paper through the air to thrust an impact on my world...