The feather I used t'wear in m'cap is morphing to a load-a-crap

This week I am spending time not doing the things I want to. I am also not doing the things I need to.

If I get off my duff, will it be worth reaping the imagined rewards, or should I just entertain myself with mindless smarty-pants activities? I could read one of a hundred books I have not finished, including the four in my work locker that I ambitiously borrowed from the library on Monday. There is slim chance of finishing one of them, and I am bogged down with endless chores that I need to do to keep a clean and orderly home, which will help please my special lady, and keep her on my side.

I could blow it all off and play one of 20 or so video games that looked like fun, but I have merely played the first half hour of, only to get frustrated and start looking up cheats on the net, which almost always sucks me back into the rabbit hole of link clicking nirvana. I am so bogged down in information by this thing that I cannot decipher bona-fide truth from paranoid ranting or slick hucksterism. (It is truly a struggle to not look up a word in the last sentence on the tubes, only to get sucked back in. I had I minor fit 20 minutes ago because there was something wrong with the connection or my settings which would not let me hook up to the wi-fi.)

Just stopping to create what I love is getting hard, and I have barely started. Seriously, distraction is now the enemy. I could spend some more time eating peanut butter, or I could drink so much more coffee that I cannot sit still. Or I could drink some whiskey and beer and for several hours I can bounce of the floors and walls, only to find myself doing nothing but sitting still for the next three days. Time to make a plan. Create structure in the chaos. Funnel the distraction into a hodge podge of cacophony so as to show anyone who is interested what it is like to be in this skin, and with this brain throbbing with self imposed chains for which the warden chucked the key into the vast freshwater sea. It used to be a vague notion that I was floundering and wasting my ability to scrawl and scribe, but now it is a panic that I feel. Something looms that threatens to stifle it forever.

I read once that Anthony Burgess, author of “Sometimes a Great Notion” and “A Clockwork Orange” found out in his forties that he had some kind of terminal illness, and only had a very short time to live. In that time he was supposed to have penned dozens of novels, all brilliant, only to not die at all. Is that what it is going to take for me to find a reason to organize the mess swimming around in my skull or like Travis Bickle, will I wait until it is too late “...to get myself organazized”.(sic)

So here I am letting it stew and fester online with no filter, wondering if it will cost me something socially or professionally, because I offer it to anyone afflicted with clickadextria. So far there have been no takers and I don't know if I am relieved or disappointed; Probably both. It really does not matter. Thousands of people are doing the same thing and the difference is that many of them have an opinion that others want to point and stare at.

TAM8 Hookie

I thought I wanted to go to that skeptic conference again, in Vegas, last week, although I would have felt at least as much an outsider as I do walking around, hometown-wise. I imagine I would have heard the word "credulous" about a hundred times and I could have made it a drinking game. That is what it would have been, too. A drinking game where I sit in my hotel room flipping past 9 channels of horse-races, listening to conferences with a notepad and trying really hard to not appear to be the only person without at least a bachelor's degree, let alone the doctorate it is assumed most of the attendees carry around tucked inside their baggy twill blazer pocket. Last year it was a humbling experience to sit shoulder to shoulder with genuinely smart people and feel like the dumbest person in the room.

So that meant that I drank my vodka in my room and thought about why I even spent the money. I was wildly interested in the speakers, was in on many of the less technical jokes, and was familiar with many of the rock-stars of nerddom from reading the magazines, and listening to the podcasts and downloading the films. I was unable to muster the courage to talk to anyone of note, except once to introduce myself to James Randi. This went badly because I had left the talent show party minutes before, whence I silently sipped my Vod-cran and brooded about bespectacled nerd-girls that I was petrified to speak to. Mr. Randi was wheeling himself down the long open conference hall and a approached and clumsily asked permission to say hello. The great man asked me what I did in the world ,and I barely choked out my unimpressive blue-collar occupation. I mus t have looked terribly embarrassed to have to admit to such a job in a a conference full of professors, scientists and celebrities because Mr. Randi replied through white beard and mustache that the world needs XXXXX too. This did not sooth me in any way and before I could politely thank him, two handlers trotted swiftly up and rolled his chair away, leaving me feeling small and more out of place than I ever have been, in the deserted upper atrium of this massive golden casino

Circumstances did not let me go to the conference this year and it was mostly because I did not make an effort to go. I stayed home and drank and avoided painting the house. Maybe I will buy the DVD set, and while I am watching it, pretend I am an incredulously wise gentleman with so many valid arguments and articulate criticisms to add to the debate.

Hello! Hooray! Its A. Cooper in Wax

...figures seen at Wierd Michigan Wax Museum outside of St. Ignace, gateway to the Superior State,

A re-purposed Alice cooper figure plays the part of a frightened teenager running from a spook in some southern Michigan cemetary.
The Michigan Dogman
James Strang, King of Beaver Island, with one of his many wives.
Or is this Alice Cooper!?!?
Hirsute gentlemen ballplayers of the Israelite House of David Sect in Benton Harbor.
Some Indian Snake princess woman...

Porcupine Pie Pt 1

The ride up the 3 and a half miles was less muddy this time, as if peddling through this sand were much better. He finally built his own bike from scratch and was fighting the cognitive dissonance that nagged concerning the choice to go single speed on an MTB, and his legs quit halfway up every incline steeper than 15 degrees. Stupid aging hipster,getting old and feeling it a month after his fortieth revolution around the sun. He was arguably more in shape than the last ride he took up these “mountains” but ex-smoker's lung and a knee surgery were a screaming reminder of his drunken married 6 year bacchanalia. Of course the ride wasn't all bad, but he was never one to smell roses, except in retrospect. His friends considered him a constant downer and had not invited him to their parties in years.

He thought about the chickie in the ranger station. He thought about her eyes and how he avoided contact with them, lest she detect the lusty intent behind his morbid unbuttoning of her all-business ranger browns. He figured that she gets the hairy eyeball from every Cabela's flannel dad, dragging Chick-Jeans-mom and here Game-Boy Dallas and Bedazzled Madison through the tree tree tree empty motel tree tree Upper Peninsula of the Great State of Michigan. This made him feel typical and flaccid, and reminded him of a twenty-four month stint of twenties tail he sincerely regretted not savoring at the time when he was also twentyish.

He confirmed his reservation for the old warming cabin on the trail to Lake-of-the-Clouds, which he was too hung over to hike to last time he stayed there, and hoped she would SEE him as he described the tracks that he thought he saw in the mud the day before, on another trail which he imagined looked just like the paw of the stuffed cougar that guarded the door of her earth-tone visitor center. He noted with sadness that she did not look up from her database with admiration and awe of he who showed no fear and almost got a glimpse of the animal that the DNR claims no longer lives in these parts, gone the way of the wolverine, the placard below the unfortunate creature assures Madison and Dallas. She did not SEE him and she was unimpressed with his nonchalant bravery at finding the intestinal fortitude not to flee her beloved wilderness, top-speed, for the safety of his preppy apartment down in Grand Rapids, where the only predators are homeless drunken panhandlers and Christian Reformed politicians.

Now he climbed what he hoped was the last hill, pushing the muddy bike up the furrow, and wishing the gallon milk-jug was supplemented by the pint of Johnny Walker that whistled like a familiar forgiving slut to him at Kamper's Kozies Gas and Fudge, back in Nagauney. The cabin was there, finally and he pushed his overloaded bike past the fire ring and complimentary wood pile, designed to keep less courteous visitors from raping the standing dead wood in the picked over and oft visited Porcupine Mountains State Park and Recreation Area.

Un-total recall pt.2

Time has come and I shod myself for battle. I won't find a deeper meaning if I try; I just have to spout until the fountain of vomit turns into a life affirming seed of acknowledgment of the violence and purposelessness of my former and present life. The markers I wishfully plant on the soil of this well trod moon are kicked over and rusty, despite the lack of gravity and moisture on these craters of the missing chunks of my brain, which I so willingly mined for their semi-precious contents during the gold rush years of the late nineties. These excavations were exacerbated by many blows to the head, some self inflicted and some gifted by others, but all well deserved, truth be told. There was no beating I could take that I could not give better to myself.
Being that this character that I played was so closed up in himself that he could only pretend to communicate with the outside, every conversation with others was really a monologue with himself. A quest to be a good guy was always trumped by self preservation and many secret shames that caused loathsome thoughts to be projected on others, after they were thoroughly tested on himself. This is not a fun thing to write about, nor to read, for him or others, and it is not evidently therapeutic. Eventually I hope that he can get it all out of his system and start focusing on something but navel gazing, but until then, he must spout into this void of a forum.

A story seems like a good place to start, so let us imagine a blue-grey sky of a curly photo with jagged borders, as if made by pinking shears. The writing on the back says something like Norfolk, VA, 1973. There is a woman with darkish pony-tale tied at the bottom of her neck that holds hair covering most of her forehead in a V. Narrow and horizontally wide dark framed oval glasses hide most of her eyes. One cannot tell if they are kind or dull or malignant eyes. Unremarkable pale skin contains thin lips and a nose that is stuck right in the usual place. A more dark than light flower pattern one piece mini-dress falls just at the crest of her decency, held to a slightly scandalous height above stick legs by a 8.5 month pregnant belly under flattish breasts. The photo girl of 19 or 22 is barefoot in sand that looks equally cold and hot. The horizon appears to belong to the Atlantic with distant moody clouds, but could as easily be Lake Superior on a particularly overcast early September evening. The angles of one or three uniform little cottages pike up to the left distance behind the puzzling young lady. She does not smile or frown. She is just not looking at anything, and certainly not the camera. What a mistake, her blankness seems to project, and one wonders if this lady should have done the smart thing 8 months before, and kept her legs shut, or saw a discrete doctor, or refused the cheap diamond chip ring that does not show up in the photo.

Un-Total Recall

Today I was hit square in the clunker, or is that the thinker? I was also reminded today that I have a purpose. I have had a good dinner with a bad condiment, and now it is time to renegotiate the terms of this existence. Time is now to make mistakes, and time is now to regurgitate. The failure of 37 years immediately transformed into something tangible and and slightly coherent. I am allowed to suck and may continue to suck, but I forgive myself and press on. Fitting the contents of my head on paper should be a simple task of recall, but neurons all got snapped and crackled through many years of substance induced boredom relief.

I will now turn that into an asset, if not a minor speed-bump. I went into that devil's bargain 20 years ago with a mystical starry-eyed teenage plan to find the Big Answer to the Big Question. I did not find either one and found myself scrambled and distorted even more than I was made screwy by my so-called protectors, mentors, and friends. But I will return to that mole-hill eventually. For now I concern myself with the quester's journey through the doors of perception, and the bitter foyer it left me standing in for two decades. One should have heeded the warnings of Nancy and Mr. T, and just said no, and stayed in school, but one was mildly creative with technicolor dreams and starry eyed hopes of communal living off the land, in a bus, an autonomous collective, or an artist's colony, hence older, bearded and flowing dress wearing mentors clamored to show a young rapscallion seeker the way to righteous brotherhood and higher understanding of the Universe.

The Young Seeker had shot his brain through a candy coated cannon, paused to pick up the pieces that he could, and scraping what could be salvaged off of the walls and gates of the imagined garden that was an ideal that died a hundred thousand times in the hopes of far more capable, articulate, and resourceful holy wanderers than himself. Even then he did not learn his lesson, repent, and go sin no more. Instead he found his true calling in the dizzy joys of liquid obliteration. He traded in his garish swirls for loud, dark and scabby bacchanalia. Organic gut twisting made way for sloshing angularity. Chaos reigned and the scales were picked up out of the dirt and put back in, septic real and tragic. Instead wringing out the visions of the subconscious, they were vomited and shat with an impatient velocity.

The left-overs of the hip-sixties and seventies are often tritely quoted as considering the whole era a blur, and that their badge of authenticity is the fact that they can't remember shit about the particulars of the time. I think perhaps that much like me and my nineties, they feel the acute shame and dread of being found out for the sad hypocritical wastes that they are and feign ignorance of their inaction and blissful apathy. The truth, however, is that I could not have had the dangerous, ludicrous and reckless joys without breaking a lot of ethical laws, and also watching many of my comrades fall out, some forever into the trash heap of a graveyard or worse, being reviled by the people who once shared the absurd joys that we cherished more than our self-respect and dignity.

Don't misunderstand me; I refuse to regret the tragicomedy I shared with neglected family, indifferent friends and laughable enemies, but it is just a little regrettable that something more noble did not come out of our wreckage. I don't know if my story is worth the price of the light on this video-screen, but I don't write this for you anyway. I am still just as selfish now as when I was when I was a crazy substance chugging nutkins, but I am just a little less destructive.