Sunday, September 27, 2009

My Music Stick


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I have invented a game

Games are a wonderful bonding experience. They encourage people to let go of their reservations, their self-control, their social protocol, and often encourage them to act out on their emotions. I have invented a new game.
In my game, one team is in charge of the balloon, which behaves like one of those 'day-after-the-party' balloons. It doesn't exactly float, but it doesn't fall fast. When hit up, it will hover. It is very easy to keep it up, if that is your goal. Keeping it up is the goal of the first team. They can hold it, hit it in the air, and pass it around the room.
The other team carries some sort of slashing or stabbing instrument. It could be a dagger or a knife. A cheap alternative is box cutters, exacto-knives, or straight razors.
Gameplay is simple. One team protects the balloon, and the other team tries to pop it.
After a few minutes, the balloon should be pretty slippery with sweat and blood. This is when it gets interesting/ comical. Gameplay should be stopped if anybody hits a vein or artery. Get it wrapped up, take a few minutes, cauterize if necessary, and get back into it. Watch your co-workers turn into primates. Feel the heat of one another's blood on your skin and bond like only brothers in battle were previously given the opportunity to. Office managers, watch from the sidelines and analyze how certain characters target one another. This is a quick and cheap method of finding out how your team is working together, who should be promoted, who should be transfered, etc. Your only other method is to ask people to tell you honestly how the office vibes are going, and they would have to be an idiot to tell the truth.

Saturday, September 26, 2009

Self Portrait

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Bored to Tears

I was granted an audience to tour the grounds, the gardens, the streets and the facilities of what turns out to be our universal afterlife, where we are all going to end up before this earth is slated for destruction due to age, to self-elimination of humankind, or due to the action generally slowing down. (Word from the top is: if humans find a way to survive the deadly chaotic cluster-fuck that is outer-space, and are not eliminated by climate change, he's going to pull another full out divine intervention and just flush the whole thing out. I had a talk with the big guy while I was up there, and he seemed a bit perturbed by the U.S. Space Program. He kept saying "How the heck am I going to kill people in outer space? No floods... nothing! Not even air!" I got a chance to hear him talk about the disproportionate amount of money the U.S. spends on it's space program, in comparison to the quality of life it's inhabitants are afforded. He just kept repeating, "Irresponsible, God-dammit! Poor people everywhere and you're building billion dollar toys!"
I think he was just frustrated about how he was going to kill them if they space-colonized, though. I genuinely felt bad for the guy. He had a plan, and for probably the 20th time, it wasn't working out the way he had expected.

Heaven (or New-Earth, as they called it there), was a decent place. People generally kept to their own, much like Earth but more accentuated by the fact that there were fewer people, less places for them to go, and within a neighborhood you would have Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and all other religions mashed together, the majority of which were still living with a sense of bitter shock that their counterparts were allowed in in the first place. I never checked up on the rules for acceptance into Heaven. There were definitely people missing, but some of the people that were there were completely unexpected- like Janis Joplin. I was perfectly thrilled to see here, but for the life of me could not locate a bit of ink or a scrap of paper, rendering me unable to get an autograph. I'm not usually an autograph guy, but for fucks sake... Janis Joplin.
The weather was decent. We had a few light showers, and for several hours my robe would be damp and uncomfortable. Honestly I would rather spend a week in Monterey, but it wasn't terrible, and at least it was interesting.

 I would say it was a mildly enlightening visit. There are a few details that I have been asked not to divulge (in the way that God asks sometimes- the way that means 'if you tell anybody I will seriously fuck you up'). I do, however, have one item to pass on about the goings on in the afterlife. This is the issue of digital displays.

Digital displays are not visible from a separate lifetime. On Earth, people are constantly being spied on by bored and curious onlookers from Heaven. These voyeuristic people watchers often pass their infinite time by watching their loved ones, their hated ones, or people that they don't even know. They watch them eat, they watch them fight, they watch them have sex. They watch them play music, they watch them break the law, they watch them do their jobs, they watch them perform in plays, they watch them sing in the shower. But digital displays, due to some scientific disconnect having to do with the faculties of Earth-watching that they somehow have, and the way that digital information is displayed on a screen, cannot be seen at all. They appear to Heaven-dwellers as glowing yellowish panels. Some of them have attempted to get around this by watching TV shows get filmed, or movies get shot, or reading what the critics say when they find somebody with a newspaper open to the Entertainment page, but, needless to say, this is hardly a substitute for an episode of 30 Rock.

On Earth, the internet revolution has massively driven people out of their lives and into the nethersphere of digital mind-fuck. 50 years ago, TV watching was perhaps a thing, but it accounted for only a fraction of life lived. Currently, a person can work, socialize, date, and play on the idiot-box, and what they do outside of that life is only the drab and monotonous, the uncreative aspects of sustenance and sleep. With the advent of mind-reading technology, quite soon we may be able to take the chemical, the fleshy, and the analog out of even those specks of verbal communication we are forced to engage in. When I am shoved aside in the subway by some jerk-wad who's not paying attention, I will hold up my iphone 55G, and through it I will relay a thought. On Jerk-wad's Iphone 55G, a message will be transmitted directly to his brain, indicating my precise location, and he will hear my voice in his head "WTF MF-er?" And what did my mom see when she was watching me lovingly from on high, trying to watch over her little boy, all grown up and on his way to work in the government-owned robot-doctor factory for the Motherland' socialized death-care industry in the Divided Kenyan Republic of Obama (or Kenya 2, as we call it then)? She will see a slightly perturbed look into a glowing yellow panel, and the guy next to me look into his own panel, and then a few minutes of heavy breathing as we both stare into our panels, perhaps exchanging blows in virtual reality, perhaps just yelling at each-other, or maybe even having gay sex, all digitally, and all invisibly.

It is so sad to think about them up there. They would love it if we would pick up a picture book once in a while. They would really love it if we would go engage in an activity. It could be cooking. When I visited Heaven, the people up there were already a bit bored. It was already a bit crowded, and any attractions had enormous lines and short turns. The cafeterias at least had conversation about Earth, because then there were still some things going on. Plays still happen, sports are still played, people still communicate verbally, people still have sex because our not quite yet communist government has not made it illegal yet. We are still something to watch, something to talk about up there. But will we be for long? And when this generation dies, will Heaven really be anything desirable at all? Or would it just be wiser to find the secret to an opt-out?

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

playing with darkness in the camera

 
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Tuesday, September 22, 2009

22 September, 7:21 PM

The date is 22 September, 2009. I am tired, and tired seems like such a normal thing to label what I am. The last two days were only barely fueled, just barely sleep-fed enough to make it through until late at night, until I lay down and fell asleep in seconds. I have pain in my lower back- a pain that makes sitting exhausting and standing a short relief, then exhausting; and sitting again a very short relief, then quite exhausting. Sometimes I lift one leg up and shake it, rattling the little socket connector that keeps my leg on, rattling it against it's connector socket. We are like playmobiles, we seem so sturdy until we are irreparable. We seem so happy until you see us with our hair off. We seem so heroic, until the cat walks in and chews our faces off, or until the very young ones crawl in, pull our legs off, and chew our faces off.

I am composing this first installment with this pain in my back. I have mentioned it to you before. I mention it a lot, to everybody I speak with- this is not that many people, I know, but my rate of mentioning back pain is quite high. It is probably close to 100 percent. I do not mention it to people in public bathrooms who say things like "shoelace is untied", or "excuse me", or "Please please stop talking. I am pooping, and I do not wish to speak." I almost do. I almost mention back pain to these people too. I know that this would not be ok, that these people are inflicted with their own inflictions. They do not need to hear about mine. I want to show them all what true pain is, what true suffering. They think they know, I am sure. We all eventually lose somebody we love. But if they felt, for just one small moment, this lower back pain, that flares up when I pronounce consonants, I am sure that they would find themselves face to face with me. I would stand and stare stoically into their tear welling eyes, and when they whispered, softly to me, as tears ran down into the corners of their mouths "I am so sorry", I would smile, not unlike Jesus himself, and I would say "No my child. It is I who am sorry. That you have endured but a moment of this. It has taught me the strength to bear it's very lesson, and you are just a visitor, unaccustomed to this glaring reality. You must go now."

When I am spent, when this back of mine finally gives way and I simply break in half, and fold, skin stretching, to die by a heavy hit to the head, to die when somebody picked the earth up, and unexpectedly moved everything striking me where my feet were firmly planted, but the rest of my body was pointing downward, bent backward at the hips, finally pulling off that bridge that I used to agonizingly contort myself into. I remember in gymnastics when I was young. I wanted to keep up, so I did bridges. Palms firmly planted, feet firmly planted, and pushing my belly to the sky, vying for the approval of my wonderful gymnastics instructor, Jeannie, I was not just planting palms and feet. I was planting the seeds of my own eventual death. Oh cruel irony, why do you toy so with these lives of men and boys?

I hope that when I fold in half like a massive game of Jenga, when that last all to risky move of pulling a critical vertebrae out from under this tower of manhood ends this story abruptly, I hope that I am hugely drunk on Campos Reales red wine. I hope that I am drunk to that point that when falling, there is no indication of falling. There is no sense of up, and the ground simply rises, slowly and very slyly, up behind me, and I have no clue that it is there. I never find out until it is all over. Perhaps it is behind me right now.

Thursday, September 17, 2009

That bald feeling

 

 

(all images are unshopped)
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Hey, you! Moth!

 
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Back Pain

Back pain is whole body pain. Back pain makes me look like I'm having a bowel movement in the middle of sentences. Back pain makes me stand up in class, in the front row, and lean from side to side, switch my balance back and forth and back again, lean back, clutching just barely not my ass, massage myself in front of people I barely know, lift my shirt and reach down the back of my pants to see if it has just been a fucking knot in my muscle these last few weeks. Back pain first made me sad, then made me angry, and now has me tired. The seat in my car is tired of being re-adjusted. My wife is tired of listening to me moan when I move. My 2 year old son just wants to be loved, why, daddy why have you forsaken me? Why are you laying there on the floor like that? Why don't you pick me up? Let's go to the park, daddy...
Fine. If I can't go to the park, I'm just going to climb on you.

Saturday, September 12, 2009

Self Portrait

Fear

I just woke up sitting at the computer desk. I looked at the time, which read 7:39. I didn't know if it was morning or evening. I didn't know if I was late for work or had just fallen asleep while sitting at the desk for a little while, while the little one goes to sleep in the next room. I have not felt terror or confusion like that for some time. I was so scared. Now, my mind is slowly piecing back together.

Thursday, September 3, 2009

While Standing In Line

While Standing in line at Safeway, I poured lavender scented dish-soap on my jacket and pants.

I was just waiting, holding both bottles upside-down, and one of them was open.

There was a splattered puddle of dish-soap on the floor, next to my soap speckled shoe.
I didn't tell anybody. I internalized guilt and moved to a different line.

That line was shorter- I had realized only once the cool soap in my pants had woken me from my stupor, my soap-spilling daydream. Being in this new line reduced my risk of slipping on soap- soap that had pooled in the middle of the aisle like some liquidy monster, waiting for the unsure step of some frail old lady- to make her fall, undramatically and quickly, and crack her thin skull on the otherwise sanitary floor, killing her instantly.