February 2012
21 posts
a regular, i was told. yet another cart pusher without cats as evidence of her crazy. i don’t know the closeness i can get so i just leave it be, sitting on the curb outside a korean-owned seven eleven store with my menthol. she pilfers my empty tall can soon as i make the bank shot. i study her every move making sure i can capture the moment just right in my mind: an elderly lady wearing...
they keep mumbling to each other terms i don’t understand. acronyms that give me a headache when i press hard to decipher. AFC. IOI. Kino. Pecking. if they weren’t my friends, if i didn’t care that that kind of bullshit works, if they didn’t buy me the drink—some trick they use to get the skirts jealous—i would tell them shut the fuck up.
fuck it.
“shut the fuck up. you guys are making...
Guilty men run, cowboys roam, and pirates drift. I spent a year not knowing I was which. Looked for an inexistence of something I demanded exist. Haven’t been home this summer, today got my papers to go back. Still same old, same old, but old feels good, man.
Sep - Jetted around the country
Oct > Dec - Palo Alto, San Francisco
Dec - Las Vegas
Jan > Mar - Cupertino
Mar > May -...
On a flight out of Charlotte I sat next to a demure lady. She agreed with my choice of diet Pepsi when the flight attendant came to ask. She took her nap while I wrote in my notebook and gazed farm tessellations being past by. When she came to and was bored we began.
She’s a cognitive therapist, priding in working with children. She’s flying home from a conference for psychologists and she ...
Been living godless too long. Without a mission, without an enemy. Can’t live like that, because then you get bored, bored enough to finally notice just how shitty every single assault of the senses reality really is, you lose the game. Then he stares at you like you’re a fucking idiot, with his arms outstretched, his shame pointer arking like the Staff of Ra.
But what can you do? When...
Last year, today, I was:
Depressed, disappointed, and offensively desperate. Now, without boring you with details, I cleared three for three. Today as a present I have calmness and, well, calmness makes you boring but calmness is also the cash to keep you abiding. And abiding, dude, isn’t the only way but on earth when there far more endurable systems, beliefs, things, learning to abide saves you a lot of heartaches.
Dwelling.
Maybe it’s not worrying about what gets lost in a fire… maybe it’s the fear I won’t find what’s really dear to me in the mess.
Like everyone I always fear what comes after when something good ends. It’s not about what I should do with myself after I’m alone — I learned to live alone young — but what do I do to restart?
I’ve started the process by cleaning. That’s what you do at 6 in the ...
Window Pause.
Lit cigarette on the sill. I’m on a comedown. Explosions in the sky, all of a sudden I miss everyone. My bank account is nearing empty again, but I’m eating good, I’m staying warm, and I have change to spare. The adventure team jaywalked across the street with a pink tutu, crackheads just walk on by. The garbageman’s name is Joe, he only picks up recyclables, Jason runs the refuse. I beg and...
It’s a sickness in us, yearning for peace. We search for a cure, end up only being entertained by barkers and charlatans. The only true salvation is knowledge, but we humans are crafty businessmen.
We put price tags on knowledge, and when people can’t afford the costs we fabricate imaginary systems of loaning money for you to go to school, which in turn inflates the costs and value of...
Around fall of 2006 the Marine Corps handed me papers to go home. Having done my time in the Carolina swamps freshly minted at 22 as a combat engineer that wasn’t sure if I could pair detonator to dynamite they told me go home after denying my first—of many—attempts to go to war. Slot’s full, they said, wait for the next cycle. Don’t worry, war will always be there they chuckled. Glad that...
What am I chasing?
Younger me wanted to be okay, something I can hold on to and stock up on. Never mind I didn’t know what okay was. Okay manifested itself as Miller’s Outpost, JNCOs, puka shells, and denim. I did things others did, followed what others praised, and accepted what others valued. It hurt, and I didn’t know why so I was angry.
Sooner than I thought I grew and wanted something real, something ...
Ten years ago I woke up to the news they were on fire. I walked to school alone for my Intro to Java class, confused. Everyone was on the desktop, sitting in front of the CRT, looking up Drudge Report.
Then they came down.
Then we went to war, because we were strong.
I was a kid that didn’t need to shave for weeks at a time. I thought I would be dead by 25. No big deal.
And I remember...
I’m only sure about two things in life:
1) The world doesn’t ever need you, and
2) No one knows the proper value on something, on anything.
Life is every busy lamentation, cognitive discomfort, quiet struggle, oversubscription, underestimation, latent realization, inevitable acceptance between these two facts.
Most people just assume life is what it is. But I learned while young ...
It’s storming in Cupertino. The community is under siege, locked down. Everyone’s staying inside. Being connected to the world, mostly through technologies that Apple didn’t quite invent but brought forth and made mainstream. When Henry Ford died, more than 200,000 people came to pay their respect to the man that had brought them an unicorn. They wouldn’t drive their cars. Detroit closed...
Give it away.
Give it all away. Instead of entrusting your unearned wealth via taxation to a government that ignores the will of its citizens, conducting trillion dollar wars, willfully ignore financial investment rules—which these days has been corrupted where estate taxes are thrown out the window, prosecute people over marijuana possession, and grants free medical care to the select...
The Fire.
Do you know how fire works?
When you brush oxygen molecules with carbon molecules in a gentle manner, they will resist each other. Richard Feyman describes it as a volcano. Imagine carbon the volcano and oxygen the ball that travels up that steep hill. Sometimes it slides back but that one time, that one time an oxygen manages to cling to a carbon we get fire. A living, breathing,...
It’s been awhile.
Who else read through their archive then sat there rocking back and forth from embarrassment? Woah, what a crazy kid.
‘Cause maybe I see Gen Y references more and more in print, they’re ratcheting up the generation war. I see Occupy and see kids upvoting and downvoting the revolution one pair of spirit fingers at a time. I see my heroes dying, and my dead heroes forgotten.
I see old...
It’s hard getting away these days.
Getting away with the two dollar sale of bullshit that something is cheaper, faster, better, stronger, thinner, friendlier, simpler, smarter, cooler, nicer, hotter, lighter, darker, sleeker, sexier, manlier, hipper, truer.
New gets geek deconstructed instantly and laid bare while bloggers can work up to any soapbox in any format and size to declare.
But maybe then it’s also getting easier. To...
Often days finding myself feeling more like P. T. Barnum looking at the world.
You know what I would do with a million dollars?
I miss fighting the night. I miss days of being wild. I miss creating. I miss writing. I miss fooling. Nowadays I sit at the table hungry, to nod, learn grace, and accept. Because dreaming is fun but I want something more risky than change, more important than fame, more powerful than money—I want effect.
Keep forgetting I’m playing in someone else’s...
So I went to see about the future, dripped and drunk on a daily basis.
One day you wake up and it doesn’t even feel like the future, it just feels like today. And you have enough troubles today to deal with without thinking about what’s happening tomorrow, next to you, above you, below you, and most often times before you.
It adds up, near years eve isn’t about celebration or capstoning. ...