quite right

"beautiful eyes" just doesn't feel quite right. But why? Why doesn't it feel quite right, to say that? Could it feel right at the right time, in the right setting?

I could go on a long boring americana tangent starting in the early sixties and burning out my mind, eight miles outa memphis in the mid seventies, meanwhile compile reams of love songs, and even more just dirty ol lust songs.

I see beautiful eyes, I mean them, I want to say so, reflect, directly, you have beautiful eyes, I say. It doesn't sound like me. My threshold for revulsion at cliche is lethally low, kills 99% of the bacteria I could have grooved with. And there's hilarious funk like LYMYP, and Alphabet Street, and that's where dynamics really kick in, cause when you're talking about beautiful eyes, that lusty stuff can seem kinda gross, a gravity well best left alone.

This is indeed an unprecedented breaker - the potential dynamics are familiar but the rhythms are not the same, this river is different, I can't say which way the waves will break. So that lonely lustful feeling, seeing beautiful eyes in my mind, trying to write it or say it, then finding it doesn't feel quite right... I can't say if it'll prevail. I can make things what I want them to be, at times, sometimes [that's like alda time].

Regardless of how I feel or what I write, those eyes will still exist, they're mercurial, persisting like an element. Maybe this is a half-life of a half-life from some era with leaking pipes and still-lacquered floors, robust in the dust.

That's the thing about glammer-magic and power. It comes from within. You can crick yourself and trick yourself into acting like just enough of a god to get things done, in other words, a human, right-sized, maybe a little on the big side, for his britches I mean, and it's incongruent cause he's so diminutive, but a noble spirit embiggens the smallest man. So suck on that. Eat a bag of dicks. You've got beautiful eyes. But I MEANT it, cause I don't normally look, so on the rare occasion that I do, you gotta know it MEANS something when I SAY it, not in some abstract way of how eyes are, but about the eye of my beholding it, you see, the reflection, a gift? I offer a gift, but I can't offer it humbly, I gotta own a part of it, just gotta wet my beak a little, you know? Like like like like like like as if I would make a simile out of it.

table setting

Setting the table for settling for scraps. Be a settler, dirt-farmer, homesteader in the desert that could become a little fertile. Setting the table to settle, not down. Settle up, pay for companionship with humility and some money. Who the fuck am I? Not bloody much it would seem, the results are in. I can afford a lower middle class lifestyle, c'mon girl, get on my dental plan, I should make USE of that, but no kids, let's not go crazy. Let's just settle, for someone, anyone. There's honesty for you. Clear the slate for a higher class of love with brutal honesty, let's make settling not so bad, call it what it is, but make what we can.

you can always fall back on the truth

Now I'm sure. And now I'm angry.... at the very point you admit you're wrong, when you're throwing me conciliation. Cause now I'm sure. Which is an admission I wasn't sure before, as I raged, unsure I wasn't raging wrongly. But now I'm even angrier cause I'm sure. And thanks I guess for at least granting me that surety, finally, turning off the gaslight. Actually I don't "guess", I'm sure it really is something to be thankful for. But the anger I now know is justified must be put to use, at long last. Kind of a shame your retreat to honesty is the site of your ruin. Your dishonesty was your strength, and it was weakness to tell the truth, but it's what you fall back on when all other options are gone. But it would be epically weak not to take this advantage and I see that winning trumps compassion, it always did, as I watch you losing, seeing there's no consolation, nothing, and of course it'll come back at me, there'll be hypocrisy and let-down all around, but it's still better than being where you are, infinitely. But it's not as fun as it might have been, to disinfect this capital with fire and bleach. The sun is shining but it never disinfected anything, you were out in the open, insisting you were justified, so sophisticated. The sun is shining down on a sterile wreck of a city, all that sophistry now a worthless currency, now we try and synthesize money from honesty.

dasein

Thinkin bout my deathbed again.
Oh, thinkin bout my deathbed again.
Please lord keep me doped up and all that, amen
Thinkin bout my deathbed again.

But this time, I'm thinking about pulling the ketamine card. Cause I'm betting you're at least partially as tortured as me at the thought of a loved one facing death with fear. And you love me, right? So I'll make a case, should be easy. But if it isn't, I'll push it, do what I have to, drive the news cycle, blog an editorial, take it viral, kickstart 'er. No prayer for the dying, but yes, K, for the dying. Animal anesthetics are the most humane. I'll take a bottomless supply to the grave and that's a demand, I'll hold myself hostage, my fragile spirit, so important in the final act, this is what I call dignity, whatever it looks like to you.

They're using K for depression, clinical trials show that it's effective, duh, I could have told them that. My mistake was jumping the gun and doing it too early, like the kid opening his Christmas presents before it's time, they phase into coal past the fossil fuel paradigm, in real-time as the forbidden opening takes place and the wrapping's torn, it's a rip-off, oh, such a rip-off. It's wrong to do it before you're ready to die, which is why it had that black mass weight for me, which was extra cool, but wore out its welcome. Gotta wait until the wearing out paradigm, lubricate the slide, the deathbed tilt, become a drop of awareness in the black sea, the always already pre-ception ocean, where I seem to have never been born, seem to see and be families across universes, never quite find a way to paint a new existence onto the bright white basement wall, but I conceive of consciousness without a body, because that's what I need on my deathbed, a conception at least, if not certainty, in fact, I don't believe in certainty, my god is mystery, nonetheless, I'm trying to stay godless as I'm thinkin bout my deathbed again.

solitaire

when i stop playing the three card monty game of online "dating" and come back to the angry rants of worldly observers, i feel better - politics is more honest, the cynicism earned, it's presented transparently... it's not snapchat filter bullshit and lol fucking w ppl - disappointed idealists comfort me, pick up my hope in humanity

watching myself get the dopamine hits from the notification sounds, the stupid involuntary heart racing for false positives, disgusting, why am i letting this happen, why did i re-start the experiment?

finally time to just read the ian welsh article about how we're just biding time, the twenty or so years we have left before we're past the event horizon of ecological collapse - but if that's the case, i want to make use of that time - but playing a rigged game isn't good use

the only thing keeping me going is that i'm in sight of the point at which i'm long past being able to say i gave it a good honest try, and can finally move on to the stage of recognizing it as a pointless waste of temporal emotional and creative investment

capital flight, share the wealth with self, share the love with none

forced

Whiskey and cigars. Don't inhale, get the fix gradual, indirect, cause it's about the look. I think Norman Mailer shot a deer there once. Home away from home. The Royal bar and grill, open mic night. Been working in a wood shop. That's technically correct, I was cleaning the woodshop. Covered in sawdust. Do a quick rough brush-off, leaving most of the dust still stuck to the jeans and shirt. Keep the clothes on, don't wash anything, keep the coat of sweat, let the pheromones do their job. There's a boldfront coming in. I'm on the front line, fronting like the confidence man. I'm gonna win their trust cause I smell like sawdust and I work with my calloused carpenter hands. I'm an honest man. I'm gonna con them, the ones that need to be conned, the ones that need a fantasy, they'll want me if they think I'm someone else, I can create that person. I can get what I want - and what I want is not so much to ask really. Just inhale that sawdust. I put the image of calloused hands in their mind, doesn't matter if that's true or not. It doesn't take that many coats of illusion, just a few, and the will to put them on. Now I'm a user, using what I'm supposed to be using, a selection from half the population.

If the online dating proves a total failure, as it's looking increasingly likely to be, after somehow talking myself into genuine positivity and the will to press on, persevere, work the algorithms, play the numbers game to the ninety-ninth decimal, gamify it for myself, max/min my character stats, be a completist, try everything, exhaust options in a hunting for crack-rock crumbs on the floor kind of way, make it a data-mining exercise, project passion dispassionately, mechanically deploy a set of variations on my presentation in a carefully curated profile, then even resort to paying for the premium account that's almost surely a scam, but what if, what if it's not, what if there's a one percent chance it works, finally, in exasperation, restart all accounts with a fake pic but the same words, to calculate the delta between honest imagery and swipe-bait... after all that playing the confidence game against myself and still nothing to show for it.... that's when I turn the con outward, look outward, externalize, use. It just so happened I got covered in sawdust today, I'll use that. Then I'll use artistic extremism, perform abortions on stage, excise a hundred concept albums in a frenzy of self-immolation, smash guitars and stay sober, force, force it. Force it. Force IT.

inertia addict

Impeach the motherfucker. Is it worth physically fighting over, fist-fighting, then street-fighting, then civil war? There's all this rage, it's gone too far, how much more can we take? Even if we could take it, should we? Fuck no, it's gotta stop, we've gotta stop it, get militant. There's some configuration of force they call "our side" cause it's never a protracted people's war exactly, there's a vanguard whether it's the left or the right, the really really motivated 3% and the 20% who can be converted into partisan killers, and force their will on the malleable non-ideological folk in the crossfire. But maybe we can step back from the brink, still work within the system, follow the rule of law. "Our side" will be sorry if we're successful in bringing down their television president, they say. They'll rise up, get violent. More violent, that is.

Now is it worth the crescent by cul-de-sac suburban slaughter, the unimaginable guerrilla warfare in big-box retail parks? Now that it's actually happening, the inconceivable, the defensive line behind Staples and Old Navy, to hold back the advancing red-hats from the Costco perimeter, can we remember what it's about? It's some emotion. We're fighting because we're fighting, it has its own momentum. It's solidified into an attempted genocide on the other. It's not like they're two races - well one of them is a race, the bloodless cyborg imperium, genetically predisposed for world domination - and then all the other races on the other side. If there's ever been a case for a race to be wiped out, it's those blue-eyed devils - if we were gonna wipe out a race, which we're not, some of those white walkers are our allies, and some of them are just so deluded they think their psychopath rulers are concerned about their cannon fodder. Only in the sense that a gun owner is concerned about his ammunition. If poor blacks can't be the property of rich whites, poor whites will suffice.

So we've been fighting for a while, cause we've been fighting for a while. Once the fight started, the inciting events faded. It's not about something that seems so small as impeachment, now that politics is on hold, it's a death struggle. Right now we're just fighting to survive til the spring, when the fuel shortage won't matter as much. But then we'll have fresh spring rage. It burns on and on like a tire fire. It's been so long, it seems, but five years is a coffee break next to those ancient feuds still spilling blood in the middle east and europe, so we'd better settle in. This isn't like one of those wars that meant nothing, like the great war, or pretty much every war since, besides ww2, it's personal. The gamer bros gloat on twitter when the power comes back on. They post a go-pro helmet-vid of somebody's kill streak. Kill streaks are real now, they don't refer to xbox games, but dead humans that stay bleeding on the parking lot instead of vanishing to lower the polygon count for faster frames. The transition from xbox to real life slaughter left the lingo intact.

This is about those people that fucked us over decade after decade with their rural votes being worth more than our city votes because of a two hundred year old hostage negotiation, those people who started the culture war that turned into the shooting war. And to be fair, we did incite violence - there was a breaking point, we did fight back, finally, we put their god-appointed leader in prison, it had to be done.

Now here we are, in the bombed out ruins of the target megastore, haha, you gotta love the dirt-cheap irony, splitting up a can of chunky soup nine ways, the last of our salvage run cut short by the drone attack. We're blaming them for this, they're blaming us for this. The perpetual hostage blame game. Is it worth it? Probably not, for us or them or anyone. But... why should we have backed down? They should have, finally, at long last, had some decency. But they didn't, we kind of knew that would happen. Will it be worth it? Probably not, too much has been lost, if we can some day sign a peace treaty, we can start producing something other than explosives, and bring the economy back to maybe a thousandth of what it was. Maybe we'll have learned a lesson of some kind. Like, never back down in the first place, so that you don't get into the position where standing firm for the moral and/or pragmatic reasons starts the kind of war never seen before, a 21st century bio-toxic dirty-bomb wired into every system that sets back world civilization itself a millennia or two.

deadass

Banging out text til I get what I want or something vaguely approximating, mating rituals a proxy for anything fertile, just ritualized dancing in private messages, save the posting for later mania. Well here we are mania, it's been a while and I missed you but I also remember all of a sudden how scary you are. But this time there are no drugs, no dangerous ones anyway, so it's different. Banging out texts, banging out bids for mating rituals approximating satisfaction, all on a credit card before the house of cards falls. Say anything and everything because economy is for tailors not writers, or whatever the fuck I'm supposed to be, bang out all text, until someone somehow validates my attempt, go out with a bang, finally. Hellyeah.