Rampage Drunk and So Forth

Last night I was fucking hammered. I got home, but it was ugly.

It always is.

I’m seeing everything in triplicate and the carbon is staining the periphery. They used to use lead in carbon copies.  Then they fixed it, but lots of them were radioactive.

My cousins have a beautiful and fascinating counter top with one zoned Uvarovite crystal right around where my eggs were sitting. It’s a beauty and distracting. But it’s just a counter top. I pored over it for hours, like a crazy person.

My body is one big ball of hurt right now.  It’s all burning and aching and half used up.  I’m supposed to go out again tonight, but I may not.  It will be insisted upon.  And I will refuse. And it will be more insistently demanded. At some point I must think of my liver, about the size of a quarter and weighing thirty pounds at this point.

The Parameters of May

That title has a ring to it.  I may use it for something some day.

Have you ever seen a diesel engine run away with itself? It’s a rare condition, and one that only effects diesels. Diesels have no electrical ignition system, no spark you can killswitch and no wires you can unplug.  If they have air and fuel, they run.

Diesels are beautiful machines.

I saw a Caterpillar run off, once. It had an oil leak in the turbo.  The engine ran hotter and faster, sucking in more fuel and speeding itself further.  The engine blew through the redline easily, the governor has no say in a run off.  The motor the size of a car roared and it gave me chills.  It was like a demonic possession.  Everyone ran scared. Then it all came apart.  Luckily the timing chain failed before the connecting rods or some other, heavier component. It still destroyed the engine, but it didn’t kill anybody.

I got exceptionally, primordially drunk last night.  I don’t feel too physically awful today.  This is rapidly turning into a blog post.

1. I have discussed the previous night’s activities
2. I have hinted at a hangover while at work
3. I have a numbered list for no apparent reason
4. Nobody really cares

I hate this time of year. You just can’t count on it.

That is a lie. You can count on it.  you can count on it to have a bunch of holidays that serve to remind you that you are completely and totally different  from  and wholly unknowable to anyone who really cares about you.  It has cold nights that remind you of the luxury of shared body heat.  It has those irritating couple-like-objects sitting on park benches and seeming happy. It has lots and lots of drinking.

I ran ten miles on Sunday. That is a huge milestone.  It’s a distance that’s always been shrouded in mystery for me. It took all I had and a little more and even at ten I din’t stop. Finally my ankles and knees had had enough and I knew they were going to fail on me.  And it still didn’t work.

• Something is wrong with me at the moment, I accept that.
• I can see all the signs of some pretty weird behavior in my recent life.
• Unless I cooked something for someone else, I haven’t eaten.
• Oh, I’ll choke down a little bit of  something someone puts in front of me to avoid rudeness.
• Roughly 80% of my calorie intake has been booze.
• Somehow, I don’t even get drunk.

I used to live like this.  I spent years in just this type of life.  It’s like you’re addicted to intensity and burning guts.

Running has failed me. I took on a membership at a gym today.  Maybe I’ll build myself into a machine again. Maybe I should.

We’re all just robots anyway.

Goddamn you

Got my bike out of the shop. Not the one I pedal, the fireball orange one with the motor. It is a motorbike, one could say.

I am happy about this.  It needs to spend the night with the battery charging.

The bike needs some work.  It needs a tuneup. It needs a bath. Thus doth the pot blackguard the kettle.

Goddamn you Wild Turkey! (1)

I’m going to sit here and get drunk. That’s plan A. I was going to stay sober whatfor I could ride the bike. The bike needs work. Goddamn you, bike. Look what you’ve made me do.

I said I was going to do 200 crunches pre-drunk. We shall see.

Goddamn you, Wild Turkey! (2)

I’m feeling all murdery. The bar is probably not the best choice of possible solutions to my somewhat non-existent boredom problem. That being said, my sister wants backup.  Not because she expects a fight, but because she’s heartbroken and needs people the way I’m heartbroken and need the cedar and sage and high lonesome.  The way I need a night freezing and hearing the frost crack the ribs of the trees.  But she is my sis, and I that means she gets first dibs on the heart matters. I’ll drink a plate of armor over that motherfucker. Goddamn you, sister.

One more little golden glass wouldn’t hurt.

Goddamn you, Wild Turkey (3).

And goddamn you, phone. always ringing with the number I don’t want to answer.

And goddamn you, Wild Turkey (4).

Burn me up. Burn me a new life machine down there in my chest-engine. Make the murder raise up, like only you do. Murder, the black greasy death of it, is more suitable to my veins than the cool and refreshing water of early nights and responsible living or the warm milk of self-pity.

I am Prometheus, come to destroy the gods, come to destroy the simple lives of the unlearned! There’s a handful of throttle outside waiting for me.

Nonsense

So, I’ve been forced to write poetry.  I think the point of poetry is basically to remove plot from prose, the more the better. I find the process ridiculous.

Want to know how to write poetry?

It’s easy. Remove most of the important words and insert line breaks at random.

For instance:

 

 

Dramamine is the end of any real travel

 

There’s no one here, just the glow

Of sun in blades

Through the pulled shades.

A living room is couches and chairs and ridiculous things

 

Two lights live here, outside the slick slices of sun

Two red intersticies orbiting the dark body of nobody.

The burning red of a cigarette

And You, red burning vacuum tube,

burn on like bourbon

Like emotion I only really feel in my fingers

Leave the red all over the wall

 

We share our eccentricity, we’re Pluto and Charon, baby

We’re all on our own here. Bodies in space sharing orbit always orbit

nothing. Some extrapolated center. But we got our gravity.

Our graviton, such as weak attractions go,

stretches between us

Like a gold ended black, rubber python

Strung through the empty bottles and over books

It’s too dark to read.

 

You know you got the job of a priest?

Turn my nothings and movings

on this ebony board and nickel-steel

Make it holy

Rectified. Justified. Sanctified.

 

I can watch the dust move in its harvest gold equation

Away from the speakers and away from my breathing

And away from the vibrating phone telling me she’s calling again

She’s worried about us, you know

She thinks we need to be outside

Around all of them, mostly her.

Just like the other missed call hers.

But it’s just me, you and this

Jaguar.

 

I remember once a woman in the Old Church

Wanted a baby more than anything, but God said no.

When she got pregnant, the praises were sung, and so forth

Her baby was a black mass of deformity and dead.

Deader than you.

 

The calendar says it’s a holy day.

I certainly agree.

 

It’s not great, but passable. It’s worse than calculus.  It’s like worded death.

Fucking poetry.

Beauty, Utility, and the Protocols of May

There was this old house I used to frequent next door.  It was a stunning example of Depression era microarchitecture.  All the walls, including internal, were 2X6 studs (vs. the more common 2X4), latticed over with slat and plastered until the walls were nearly a foot thick.  The basement was austere, but well finished by hand labor and user designed.  Everything about the house was over-built.  Anywhere roughcut lumber would do, the owner/builder had personally inspected and dried true boards.  The attention to detail was startling when you’re used to the homebuilding practices of today, where a set of different contracters comes in like an assembly line every day with thoughts only of profitability.  It’s a small house, but still stand true without a single plaster crack or floor warp after 80 years.

It’s also beautiful.

I wonder, more today than other days, about my sense of beauty.  I can find one woman beautiful and her very similar, and by other’s acounts ‘hot’, friend to be easily ignorable. I have had girlfriends who turn heads other than my own wherever we went, but never piqued any real visual interest in me.

I have some sense of my own aesthetic value, and I know it’s quantifiably up there.  That isn’t meant as bragging at all, it’s just observable phenomena that plays into my general point. I have no problem attracting women, though I’m usually clueless when it happens without some other female pointing it out.

In the world of pure aesthetics, I would do well.  But as I have said, my aesthetic sense is skewed by some unknowable factor.  I find some women distinctly, devastatingly attractive. Those are the ones that ruin me.  Every goddamn time.

For a while, I dated only women I found moderately attractive.  It let me stay sane. Then there would be a trickling pour of beauty I would notice about them or in them and before long, I was as distinctly and devastatingly attracted to them as I would be to Rashida Jones if she were to get a PhD  in marine biology.

There are attractions that spark and immolate like a saffron robe covered in gasoline. There are those slow burning attractions that have to build and stoke.  It’s like a prairie fire verses a forge.

Prairie fires are an engine of evolution, it’s true.

Forges are beautiful inside. There is a survival utility about them.

Like hips on a woman.  Like the way she says your name different than all others. Like the way you know she could follow you anywhere.

Either way, you’re fucked.

Rock Hammer II

The last of the cars fell down from the sky, upside down and immolated.  The first of the dust covered crawlers emerged, leaving maroon slug-trails of blood and effluent humanity.  The panicked people had already crumpled to the ground in horror or ran blindly into the skidding traffic.  Rock Hammer beheld them sidelong and allowed himself a brief, unbelieving head shake.

She was saying something. It was at the end of a tunnel. The hissing scrape of a gray tunnel sound grew and receded as her and Rock Hammer stared daggers into me.  Their words were clarifying from the haze. The waves of screams were starting.

“Jesus fuck, he pissed his pants.”

Rock Hammer stares through me. She’s sitting with a hand on my shoulder.

“Are you ok, hon? Come back, it’s fine. Things get scary sometimes,” then to Rock Hammer, “Fucking asshole.”

7. Rock Hammer is a fucking asshole.

I stammer out some sort of apology to Rock Hammer, but he has decided to ignore my weakness.  Rock Hammer generally ignores that which he deems disgusting.  He reaches up to his shoulder and extracts the bloody shard of glass and sets it on the table. He squeezes the shards out of his face like popping a zit. Then he bangs his fist on the table and yells.

“So, what the fuck’s up with my beer?!”

When this raises no rush to service by the staff, he reaches behind him and pulls a glass and dust filled beer off the tables of our neighbors. They de not object. They are crying and two may have pooed themselves. Whether from the blast or from Rock Hammer’s intrusion is debatable.

She watches me compose myself and try to manly up and face down the shame of my reaction to the explosion.  A reassuring had is on my thigh and she whispers nice things.  Rock Hammer is about to explode.

“Look, are you hiding the fucking rock or not?”

The rock?

“Hide my fucking rock or I will kill you!”

That rock. I regain some voice: “Rock Hammer, I think the rock can wait, look outside.”

The chaos was growing.

“What the fuck do you think they were aiming for?”

“Aiming? That was just an explosion. Maybe a propane truck or something.”

“It was a strike.”

“Look man, you’re being crazy.”

“Rock Hammer is right, baby.”

8. Rock Hammer is generally right.

“He is?”

“Yes, the radius shows downward expulsion into a central vehicle.”

“What? How do you know about any of that? Where did you get field glasses.”

“Rock,” she says, “we need to get him out of here. What is that rock?”

“The target of that strike.”

“Wait,” I say, receiving some sort of murder look, “Then why would whoever wants to kill the rock, which is ridiculous, blow up the parking lot?”

“That’s where I put the laser transponder.”

“Laser.”

“Yes, I figured with the tactical environment, I could expect a precision laser guided munition strike, probably with a cellulose resin bomb body. No evidence, no shrapnel, just flying car parts.  They’ll call it a car bomb. Anyway, I hid a transponder covering the possible tracking laser freqs of that GBU. It was meant for us.”

“What?”

“What Rock Hammer says sounds about right,” she says, “We need to move while the chaos is still providing C&C.”

“C&C?”

“Cover and concealment.”

“Who are you people?”

“I am motherfucking Rock Hammer. You will do as I say”

“NO. I am your girlfriend, you will do as I say.”

Rock Hammer is oblivious to this challenge of his authority as he has already jumped through the broken window.  He howls. It is terrifying and the bombfright is erased from the minds of the wandering sheep herd of humanity.

9. Rock Hammer howls.

From the far corner of the parking lot, cars start exploding individually toward us. The trail of destruction and debris explodes up like some great uncoiling thing in the earth, rolling toward us like the Apocalypse. Which is appropriate. From the pile of trash, a primer gray and smoke belching old Ford with a yellow, red outlined star on the grill emerges.

“Jesus,” she says, “He brought the Bikini Clad Warrior Concubines.”

10. Rock Hammer has associates.

It’s Complicated

That’s my new Answer. To everything.

It seems like nothing is ever really linear anyway.  So, when the subtext starts pushing up from between the lines and jumbling the script, then I say fuck it. It’s complicated.  I’m not going to try and read any of that jumbling invisibility or infer some occulted meaning.  I’m just saying It’s Complicated and ignoring it.

I foresee a few issues arising.

What if it wasn’t complicated? I don’t give a shit, you should have made yourself more clear.

What if you’re ignoring something important? I’ll figure it out when it’s no longer complicated.

When will things be uncomplicated? That question is complicated. It must be ignorable.

Then there are those complications I’ll treat simply.  I’m just going to ignore the complexity and act in simplicity.

Kick in the door, shoot them in the face.  Hopefully you’ve got the right problem in your sights.

Worry about that while you thumb off the safety and feel the snicker and grab of the trigger moving.

Rock Hammer I

*Note: This might confuse the shit out of some long time readers, especially those from the old blog.  Get over it.

“Is that blood on your shoes?”

“Probably. Hard to tell.”

1. Rock Hammer does not offer information.

He sets a boulder sized fragment of a rock on my table, spilling some soup.  Without asking, he shuttles the coat and gloves on the bench opposite me out of the way to make room for his cask-like body and a near demolished framed backpack. He is wearing shorts and sandals.  It is snowing outside and below freezing.

I drink some coffee and stare at him as he slides off his jacket and pushes food in front of him to the side, spilling soup in the sandwich plate.  I wince knowing how much the owner of that food hates soggy bread.

“So, Rock Hammer,” I ask him, “Why are you covered in leaves and twigs?”

2. Rock Hammer always goes by both names.

“I had to climb over the tree in the back to get over the fence.  The doorman doesn’t let me in, any more.”

“That makes sense.”

“Of course it makes fucking sense.”

3. Rock Hammer always makes fucking sense.

The waitress comes by and puts down my beer and the glove owner’s Manhattan.  She puts it too close to Rock Hammer and it is no longer my beer.  I politely order another from her and shoo her off before she does something crazy and asks him if he wants to order.  The beer is quickly destroyed. The Manhattan follows.

“FUCK!”

4. Rock Hammer bangs his fist on tables and yells.

Rock Hammer bangs his fist on the table. Patrons turn arming up their best looks of privileged antipathy.  They quickly look back at their own food and their own parties. Rock Hammer generally is unkempt, but he looks more frightening than unhygienic today.  Every movement sends a hail of fine brown dust flying from his clothes and wildly imaginative hair.  His beard has grown legendary. It has a twig protruding from next to his mouth.

At least he isn’t howling. Or naked.

“So, what brings you in…?”

“Shut the fuck up.  This is important.  I need you to do me a solid. Take this,” he gestures at the rock, “and hide it.”

“Rock Hammer, that’s a rock. Couldn’t you just have thrown it anywhere?”

“Anywhere?” he shouts.

I feel the cold hand of fear grasping me. “It’s just a rock, right?”

“Just a fucking rock?”

And the air between us incinerates under his twitching gaze.

5. Rock Hammer never brings you ‘just a rock.’

Silent and deadly, in his hand materializes his rusted rock hammer.  It looks to be the 20 oz. He is going to kill me.

That’s when she walks in. The rock hammer falls to the table The glass surface spiderwebs.  Some men undress women with their eyes. Rock Hammer drags them into a cave and beastfucks them with his eyes.   Especially when he hates one.

“You,” he squeezes through a locked jaw.

She pushes me aside and sits next to me. she folds a napkin and smiles. She nods and greets him.

“Rock.”

“Rock Hammer.”

“Rock is easier to say.”

“So is ‘Harpy,’ but I still have the respect to call you Evil Harpy Whore Spawn of Satan.”

“That’s catchy…” I say to the general ignoring ears of all involved.

A deafening explosion rocks the outside parking lot, sending shards from the broken windows raining in on the customers closest to the blast. Instictual ducking isn’t enough. I take a shard to the forehead and feel the first pooling of blood in my eyebrows as I raise my head above my sheltering table. Neither has moved.  She has one of the heavy leather menus held at high-ready next to her face with the blocked shrapnel sticking in it. Rock Hammer didn’t bother.  He has a six inch chunk of glass embedded in his arm and cuts on his face.

6. Rock Hammer feels no pain.

Compositionally Speaking

There is this thing I do.

I start with twenty-five perfect form pushups, the kind where your chest brushes the ground and you have to keep your head up to keep from smacking your face on the concrete.  That is reasonable, I think.  I give myself a short break. Very short.

Then I do twenty.  Again, this is no big deal. I’ve only done forty-five of the things.  It starts to wake up some muscles I forget about sometimes.  Those little guys in your shoulder, for instance.  They suck.

A short rest.  Not enough for all the pain to go away.

Then I do fifteen. Then ten. Then five. Then four. Then three, two, and one.  Then I come back.

One thru five and then ten more, if I got it. That makes one hundred pushups in less than ten minutes.  It’s insane.

What makes it crazy is the situps I do in the interstices.  Those short rests are actually just however long it takes to knock out the same number of situps.  So, within ten minutes, I’ve done one hundred of both.  That’s when I decide to give myself a sixty second muscle failure drill.  Sixty seconds to do as many pushups as I can, going to my knees if I’m not able to hold out any longer.  Then I do the same with situps. Then repeat.

This whole process takes around 15 minutes. It’s fifteen minutes of hell. I give myself a breather after that.

And then, if I’m feeling Okay About Things, I continue on with whatever I’m doing. If not, I do the same with some other muscle group, doing pullups for example.  I have yet to go more than two cycles in one sitting, but I have went through five cycles in a single day this week. Either way, I always end up Okay About Things.

It’s like some form of low grade magic.  Not the kind you’d see in a temple, but definitely the kind sold out of the back of a wagon.  All that, and I don’t have to change clothes, I don’t have to go anywhere, and it’s free.  It hurts, that is no lie.  But there’s some dark and primal part of your body that awakens upon muscle failure.

That shaky and blood-full time where you can feel your muscles swollen against the previous confines of your skin are akin to some sort of physiological revolution.  Your deeper and less esoteric self has driven the academics and skinny necked politicians against the great wall of punk-ass bitchednes and gunned them down and dragged them through the streets like the Christians of Byzantium.

I’m not sure if being stronger makes you dumber, but it is most definitely a fair trade some days.

Four cycles of these pryamidically constructed agonies is one hour out of the day.  That’s the same time elapse as a therapy session.

And therapy sessions definitely make you dumber.

Deathmetal and Sympathy

Over the last two months I have had very little caffeine.  It was next to impossible to find and decidedly detrimental to my physical abilities.

I have since made up for lost time.

I’m sitting here convulsing.  My fingers have the clammy pall of death and my eyes are forgetting to blink, turning my corneas to blood and dust.  I have Billy Cobham and Jack DeJohnette dueling it out in my head.  The smallest bit of trivia sends me skidding off into the dark night of the Wikipedia, lost for months and years.

It’s like the wrong kind of high.  The one that makes you scrub a layer of skin off in the shower.  It’s the high that turns a spinning body oblong, then eccentric, then off-balance enough to blow apart. Have you ever seen that? It’s amazing.  I saw a piece of aluminium warp and bow and frag like a grenade one time.  The lathe was doing 20,000 RPM, the metal was taking high polish.  then there was a rumble, then a chatter, then a goddamn asteroid belt of silver fibers everywhere.

Every new map I make takes untold minutes to load, so I have to maniacally check Facebook and email and phone and over and over.  I know no one has said anything.  I know nothing has happened in anyone else world, but they have the normal one.  The one where it doesn’t take forfuckingever to pass one solitary minute.

I must hydrate.

Or join a jazzmetal band.  It could go either way.