as if

I think I am going to try writing here as though I had readers, to see if the spaced age sages are right and that if you make a place for something it will appear.

This one, though, will be short and prosaic but the sort of thing one would want to tell one’s readers if one had readers so I am going to tell you all that I am writing music again and have most recently put up eriktrips’ debut track “I Remember Will,” which can be found at both thesixtyone.com and at last.fm for auditioning.

A word about the mix: the vocals are quiet because that is how I have always done vocals. The words really, honestly, are not important; I am much more interested in texture and melody. I guess this means I won’t ever be a pop star but what can you do. Contrariness is deeply ingrained in my nature. Or my nurture. Or somewhere in between.

The other thing I am going to advertise in this little, um, advertisement, is the ever-bated-breath with which I await the final final galleys for my book, One Last Ditch. I have created an “author” page for myself on facebook (I am not sure if I could have chosen “writer,” but I will try to change it if possible, given that the author is beginning to smell quite ripe at this point), which is where I will put news of things like actual book releases, readings, photo opportunities, and other occasions for plugging my sorry version of poetry. And it is sorry. Not sorry, but sorry.

You know.

Carry on.

not my planet

I keep wondering why I have a blog when I put most of my everyday accounts of everyday on my LiveJournal but this one was supposed to be for something more organized and it has turned out less so. Occasionally I think of a rant I might want to write and then I think to myself oh that would be way too much trouble and so there goes another day when I put nothing on my blog.

Well this afternoon I wrote something and because it is close to bedtime I don’t have the energy for making a recording of it so you all are going to have to imagine my intonation on this one. Reading it through a few times will probably help you to decide where the commas would be if I deigned to use them which I rarely do because I do not like telling people when they should pause. Obviously the sentence needs to end so I’ve retained periods but even there I sometimes leave them out because two thoughts go together and again I do not feel the need for a semicolon to announce New Thought Now as it seems obvious enough to me.

So here is an entry. I would like to say that I am going to try to do this more often and of course I am but I cannot even begin to predict whether I will actually do so. Too many variables. I had a name for this when I started writing it but I forgot to write down the name and now I have forgotten it. It started with an “S” and I believe it was only one word. Anyone who would like to suggest something feel free.

And thus:

~~~~~~~

You ever have one of those mornings you wake up before sunrise and you already know the day is going to be too bright and too warm and one whole side of your body is aching because every time you sleep in your bed now whichever side you slept on for the past x hours wakes up in pain be it the left right or backsides. You can’t even drink your coffee without taking your bupe first because you are a little sick but you can’t tell if it’s because you didn’t eat enough yesterday or because you’re, you know, sick, so you let the good pills melt under your tongue and you’re careful not to swallow and they take forever partly because you are always dehydrated and partly because you are on such a large dose and partly because drugs always do something unusual when they enter your body in particular.

Once the bupe is melted you can drink your coffee which is cold now but that is fine as the first hint of day is already impressing you with its mildness and somewhere over the city you hear a small single-engine aircraft and right then your gut twists up just enough so you can feel it but not enough that anything you can do will untwist it. You go about your morning you have some errands to run groceries to buy bills to mail and maybe you could use a new hat but you can’t find a hat that suits you so you buy some more socks because you’ve taken a liking to a completely different kind and it will take some time to collect enough to last from one laundry day to the next and you try to remember the last time you did laundry but you can’t reckon it at all. Was it last summer? Or did you do laundry in the fall? I don’t think I did.

Last night for about a minute the objects that surround you closely in your room keeping you safe from the outside took a step back and looked unfamiliar not unfamiliar enough to send you into a panic but unfamiliar enough to make you tilt your head. You’re on your thirty-hour circadian rhythm and tomorrow is a daylight day that is today is a daylight day the day that is too warm and too bright and in the morning you heard that small airplane and it reminds you of things you cannot say or rather things you have already said and do not feel like saying again heat humidity and afternoons trying to fend off advances and it is not clear what the connection between the small aircraft and those things are except that there were lots of them back then it seems or was it his obsession with them that made you think so.

He got to work with airplanes but you never could decide what you wanted to work on much less work with and it turns out there is no work put together in such a way that you can do it and you wonder whether any other of his passions are still indulging him but you have to stop because it makes you feel like you are supposed to come to someone’s rescue if there is someone back there still needing rescue. If it were any other family you’d say oh they’re watching and not letting anything happen but they were watching both of you and look what happened.

But so you get up thinking that it will be another day like other days but after the airplane flies over you notice the objects surrounding you taking another step back and the day becomes like another kind of day as familiar as the day you were expecting but older by far like so old you cannot place a beginning date on it older than time which to you is only a little less than 50 years old at this point before that the same oblivion that awaits you the same immersion and dissolution or that is not the same but another configuration in which you do not figure as anybody anyone would recognize.

I aim to be dead long before I die but still moving in fact moving so fast I am as transparent as a blur. Life I’ll say it again once more lines itself up with and runs alongside that which is not its reverse but its twin the same only a little different that difference just enough to matter or to make matters not worse but worsted or basted or stitched together skin reaching into its own decomposition and growing together with it.

I know few Christians who do not fear death. I should qualify Christians with Conservative or maybe I should just say my mom fears death more than any other saved soul I have ever met. Her heavenly home is already built and lit and polished and awaiting her whereas mine is uncertain or I should say it consists of the internal consistency of what’s uncertain where nothing survives but the question of what now or what next and not to suggest that I have achieved some superior understanding of understanding I have achieved only less and less understanding the more I have come to know but that last step into whatever no longer frightens me particularly. It seems unthinkable naturally but that is only because it is. Where thought stops there is no imagining a what now or what next and that is impossible to understand or comprehend so the only reasonable response is to give up knowing.

When the sun shines down finally swinging over to the west as it does implacably every day around this time is when what you most cannot say presses itself mute and suffocating. Because you wish to be concrete you think to mention the bed or the blue curtains or the way that room in particular hung over the northeast corner of the house precariously because as I said storms come from the southwest and so you want to be under the southwestern wall as they are more likely to hop over you and take that bedroom right off the opposite side of the house. We lived on the side of a hill not the very top but on a low ridge on the side of a larger hill but there were no hills in front of us that is none close by to the west where I thought we needed one.

One night the wind blew so hard it started to roar and we who thought we would always know and have time to head down to the basement were caught listening in paralyzed wonder at how much louder it might get before dying down.

What is there to tell in a story and to whom does one tell it. You could make a list but there seems little point in explaining it point by point this is not an exposé. Another engine sounds somehere on the network of streets in which you now live encircled by motorized traffic how could you have chosen this for yourself the internal combustion engine was his fetish and now you must listen to them all thirty hours. Mostly they blend together into a pleasant rushing hum but ever so often someone finds it necessary to show off their skill at defeating the purpose of a muffler and if it only makes you think of rednecks and beer you get off lucky.

They’d kill you if they knew you but if that’s it then they are relatively harmless. There is no such thing as worse than death because death is not the worst thing we can imagine we only think it is because we cannot imagine it at all and somehow that makes it terrible. Nothing is worse than death not because death is the worst of all things but because the comparison is without sense. What makes sense or what remains barely intelligible in the face of tremendous pain is that life can bear atrocities and keep going. To experience a fate worse than death means only to have to take on at full intensity the capacity of life for suffering. That there are infinite ways to suffer and infinite variations and gradations of pain—

I was born without endorphins. This is not strictly true or rather it has not been medically established but my hunch is that some level of some one or other of them is not what it would optimally be. I realize this is to claim that my pain is worse than yours but that is not the point at all it is that I do not understand why everyone is not screaming. Why are you not screaming. Very few do and most of them are very young. I am told I screamed a lot and was a “fussy” baby. I think that meant I annoyed my parents with my susceptibility to discomfort. As an infant I was allowed to convulse.

You’d think, this many words in, that you could have named it by now but that is the heck of it it won’t be named because the only things I could say about it would be insufferably mundane he put his thing there and asked me to do this other thing that I did not want to do and I said no many times but he badgered me as many times as I would say no plus the one time I would finally give in.

This happened repeatedly.

See what I mean? There is nothing there about single engine airplanes and their low whine and objects receding or the time and the place getting lost inside of the labyrinth where I try to hunt down what pricks.

It was not just the physical discomfort or the shame but the continual battering at my puny defenses and he certainly was not the only one and his way was not the only way in which it was done.

Have I listed my diagnoses lately? Someone on the Internet has asserted that many psychiatric diagnoses are subsumed by PTSD. If that is true then the only diagnoses leftover from all I have written on my records would be Complex PTSD if it were yet diagnosable overlaying everything else only with Psychotic Features still sticking out thus making me a case of Complex PTSD with Psychotic Features. Everything else disappears viewed through the lens of this possible information for what is information but possible information when one is not sure yet whether it states the case exactly. Left out also is the question am I on the Autism spectrum but that question has been tabled until such time as I can afford to ask it privately. Until then I am simply going to assume that I am.

I hear sounds that few others hear. I have physical sensations that few others have. I only like the sun in the wintertime when it is low and scattered not only because it is less bright but because it signals cool air and it causes colors to floresce. At least, I see them floresce. This happens almost every evening as well up to a certain amount of cloud cover.

I forgot the Opiate Dependency. I can never remember that it is considered pathological.

If I keep writing the engines will stop.

Right?

page two is page one

I have been working on this drawing for a couple of days which I do not know if it really excuses me from not posting for two days but there it is. I have also been sleeping. I sometimes sleep for hours and days on end.

This is page two which is really page one of the book I showed you page one of the other day (that page is really about page 9—I opened the book to a random page to start). With this one I took a very soft pencil and tried a few different ways of following the paper itself which I may have mentioned is a very coarse handmade paper and so it invites you to follow it, sometimes rather strongly and sometimes very subtly. I am still trying to write without writing anything but even this seems to suggest certain things to the pattern-seeking brain and so it may be that writing without writing about anything is something one cannot actually ever show to anyone else.

This page I coated in acrylic sealer after I was finished writing so it is semi-translucent in spots. I ended up laminating it to the page underneath not accidentally but not with a great deal of aesthetic forethought. I think together they turned out fine but you cannot really tell that you can see through them on the scanner.

This is a thumbnail that leads to an image just under 1000px wide:

page two page one pencil on oiled paper

page two page one pencil on oiled paper

writer's book

this is the first page of a book that I am trying to dedicate to different forms of writing. that might not be apparent on first glance. it is completely abstract: mainly line, some color, no traces of letters but I started it out in pencil, following the contours of the very rough, handmade paper. this is not the first I have done this sort of drawing but it is the first time that I deliberately associated it with writing while making it. whether that makes it writing is not necessarily for me to say, but I was trying simply to write when I laid it out. other pages might come to contain that which is more recognizable as English or they might not; my only plan is to write, in one way or another, on each page subsequent to this one.

that is all I am going to say for now, except that you can click on the image to display a larger version. we’ll see how the rest turn out if I can ever learn to do this sort of thing more quickly than one piece every two months.
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redo

I swear I posted on the third, fourth and fifth–or was it the third, fifth and sixth?–I managed to miss a 24-hour day in there somewhere by living a 36-hour day which included staying up for 24 hours before taking a very long nap but um this is not my personal journal so I do not mean to be diarying here just explaining that see my web host was doing a migration and somewhere in the interstices between servers three of my posts for NaBloPoMo slipped away into dust or whatever it is that bits become when they cease to be.

or, um, wherever they go when they all get zeroed out. I guess they resolve into non-difference then although I imagine it could be argued that the circuits in which the zeroed data used to exist still remain as heterogeneous surfaces or objects although I know it is not meant to be made of more than one or two things but still there is no such thing as repetition or there is no such thing as an identical instance of zero.

mathematicians will argue with that but I am not meaning to look at zero as a defined entity or a defined non-entity but just an instance and instances never repeat although they do cycle through. the circle is a spiral but it is not headed anywhere. it does not spiral up, for instance. nor does it spiral down, left, right, south, north, east or west. I would say it spirals in place but spiraling instances do not stay in places.

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what to say

so it seems that my last two posts have disappeared from my database during a web host migration to a different server. I would go into some trouble to track down a backup but I think I can re-do them a little later but first I must post today’s piece.

this started out as an unremarkable piece of ascii art which for just a moment became something kind of interesting but I ruined it and by that time I was out of undo’s and recreating it from scratch would have been a waste of time so I kept working at but it was unsalvageable once I passed a certain point so I finally deleted almost all of it and made this from the little bit I kept, which is not ascii art as it now contains utf-8 characters although that doesn’t matter since it isn’t text at this point.

I am not yet certain if I like it or not or if it was successful in any way but I did try something completely absurd and ended up with something completely unrelated to my first idea and looking good enough that I dare to post it.

it’s a bit minimalistic. it might help to download it and look at it against a darker background. perhaps I should have created a dark border for it. perhaps I will. not right now, though.

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here's the thing

oh golly it’s novemeber 2 and I haven’t written a single post yet. already blew it! that’s ok. I’m going to try to hit the remaining 29 days.

I might try some weird stuff this month, like incomprehensible gibberish. it may amount to something or it may not amount to anything or it may seem like it does not amount to anything but for that very reason be of some value in some land where words are daily dismantled and reassembled in order to amuse children idiots and lunatics.

in case you want to go an an anti-ableist rant I’ll just point out that I am not particularly grown up, not particularly party to knowledge that is not freely available, nor particularly what is understood in US culture as well-adjusted or even sane at times. which may mean I have internalized negative messages about people like me or I might be using epithets ironically or I might be using them for reasons that are neither self-denigrating–why would that be necessary?–nor intended to distance me from the whole messy affair of how language strikes us when used as a weapon but to plunge me into battle in a way that does not involve arguing for my views. doing that only stresses me out so I am trying to give it up wherever possible.

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greasing the wheel

So I’m getting all hepped up about NaBloPoMo which actually I think resulted in my deciding to publish a book last year so I think it would be a good idea to try it again this year and see what happens (the book is not out yet, in case you were wondering where—or what—it was).

nablopomo 2009 Banner

Lately I have been working on the possibility of abstract poetry/prose taken beyond what Gertrude Stein did with it but it is not clear to me exactly what direction to go in so I am doing a few experiments. I might try some keyboard stuff here for the month or I might just write my usual kind of abstracty stuff and I may go off on a rant or two but I think I have mostly decided that I am not all that interested in writing a ranty blog and so instead I am writing an artsy blog that is more or less focused on words and what they might be able to do. images sometimes and in fact one of my current experiments is photographic so my first post may be a link to flickr. Yeah I should have my own photo gallery and once upon a time I was even going to code it myself but then I finished my degree and suddenly found myself having to earn a living by doing something more than reading and writing, which I still do. So teaching and editing sometimes get in the way of my ongoing self-education in all things computer.

So this is just a preliminary post. Not the real thing. If this were a real post it would have some substance. I might, though, get going with this before the first of November, to try to work out some sort of rhythm before the race begins.

And I suppose I’ll take down last year’s banner now. Ask me about the Christmas lights I bought two years ago that are still in the Walgreens bag in the corner of the livingroom. If I ever get them put up, they are staying up the rest of my life.

not this time

so I am writing this. I am writing something of a genre piece insofar as autobiography is a genre but I have no illusions as to whether or not this particular, um, work will quite fit the description or remind anyone of what they usually think they have encountered when they read an autobiography but there is it seems a fair amount to be asked about the idea of the genre itself although I cannot imagine that many grad school seminar papers have already addressed the idea of graphing oneself or that is to create a grapheme a grid a scheme a drawing that begins with a line and ends with a line and proposes to write or draw or sketch itself out around the intimate details of a particular instance of the species a biome or biological exercise in bringing logos to the living to graph out a course that tells itself about itself and then as a genre presents its self stylized rendering to a reading audience of one kind or another but what is there to be said about any of that that has not already somewhere been said I cannot imagine that much is left to discuss.

given the culture that I grew up in and which grew up in me and we have fought it out ever since coparasitic creatures that we are but given that growing and fighting and sucking the life out of one another I would wager that the expectations of the genre would include something like a linear progression from a past into a future and of course I would be much more insane than I actually am if I claimed to have ever even considered trying to tell anything in chronological order and there again you have logical order being given to chronos who is not by any means as orderly as we dream him to be and so it does not escape me that the form which this pictograph takes indicates nothing about a past or a future although I think that anything presented here is immediately taken up by a past time of reading or of things occurring to me when they occur to me but not in the order that they occurred to me if you get my meaning.

they say it is a common feature among those of us who have picked up the post traumatic emphasizing disorder as one of our many diagnoses that we live as though we had no future and in a mundane or that is daily day-to-day way of doing things I absolutely fit the stereotype and at this age even rather than thinking of a future that I will voluntarily toss away at whatever point it becomes apparent that my future was not what I thought back then would suit me right now but at the moment today that is tonight with this writing come along right here and I will try to tell you what I mean but I cannot guarantee that what I mean will be able to take the breach that is to make the leap or to translate from my tongue into yours but so to speak or as I would put it having lost a decade of my life to something enough like psychosis to get it labeled as such but not enough like it for me not to notice that something was terribly amiss that is when I was young I thought psychosis brought relief from the pressures of the day but little did I know that what it actually does is transmogrify them into the most harrowing and belligerant voices from some other day somewhere in that past that does not seem like a past because what I have of a past consists of those voices and figures who continue to harangue me half in and half out of the plane that is my body face to face with the universe whereas actual physical evidence of a past is fairly nil and even memories of places and things and people when something floats up out of the bottom of a box packed up twenty years ago for instance it is jarring in the extreme because I I do not have a past I have managed somehow to shed the material traces of having had a past but with the disappearance of the past and the future I never expected to have it has seemed to me only recently that it is possible that I have survived my own death and not because of the exceedingly slim probability that someone might read this after I am dead.

no that is not the point at all.

I am on facebook and I am browsing pictures of my high school class and suddenly I am overtaken by the panic that these faces could somehow portend the grasp of a history that I cannot live down or outlive or outrun or drown out as though simply looking into the eyes of someone whose last face I recall as open as any other at the zenith of youth waiting for life to begin to happen and then somehow finding oneself engulfed in life happening but not at all as planned and not at all as not planned and not at all as imagined although it was and has been and still is unimaginable and that is what it is like to live indefinitely without a future: I cannot imagine much less plan for next year or even next month they will come and go and I will either live through them or not but I cannot imagine them in any particular shape other than the desire of a wounded animal for water unforthcoming. but as I almost said but did not the past which slides away from me constantly water off a well-oiled pelt waits for me in a future that I did not design nor choose and because of that I run a zig-zag path unpredictable and dicey lest history become matter with muscle and fists and burlap and ropes and spirit me away in the trunk of an old church bus without any chance of my getting away this time. if time is an arrow that draws you back to itself then my flight across the range must be eccentric enough to throw me out of orbit and it is there that night and day no longer march in orderly procession and thus I wriggle out of its grasp and on.

Reduction–a video with script

I keep forgetting to blog. I am going to try to stop forgetting and do things like this more often instead: here is a video of me reading a new, um, thing, currently entitled “Reduction.” Below the frame you’ll see the actual words to the reading part, not the rambling introduction part. I suggest not reading them until after you have listened to it as this piece, more than others, is quite different when read aloud than when read on the page, unless you somehow intuit what I am doing here and know exactly how to adjust your intonation.

If by chance this turns out to be true, I’d appreciate a comment or an email that explains in great detail what I am doing because after writing this I found there were a few passages whose raison d’être I had forgotten. Not that that matters terribly, but since I wrote it I’d kind of like to understand a little more about why which word went where.

I hope you enjoy it whether or not you can figure out whatever there is to figure out. I do think it is entirely possible to enjoy it without knowing precisely what is going on in it.

http://www.youtube.com/v/B3HeXdKjN9Y&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0×006699&color2=0x54abd6&border=1

Here’s what I’m reading:

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