SINCE THEN ︎
WORK IN PROGRESS ~~~~~
Alright alright, the fluctuations of the creative process and my own bizarre compulsive need to archive my life. I did the Japan Zine, I finally finished the last post on here (Chapter End, from the corporate days), and now I’m working on THE BIG BRAND. So, currently, I’ve had enough with the painstaking organization and clean coherent-ish linear storytelling. TIME FOR FUN! Or something like that...
btw tonight, starting this post, it’s monday october 21, 2024... there’s no fukn dates on this site
AND continuing it, it’s thursday january 23, 2025... back in key west under the influence of NOTHING BUT JOY
And now it is late phase February. PHASES CONTINUE! It seems this may just be life, strange as that is to admit.
stay with me, eh? this is a collection of raw material, and i can’t promise much beyond this: it won’t be boring.
btw tonight, starting this post, it’s monday october 21, 2024... there’s no fukn dates on this site
AND continuing it, it’s thursday january 23, 2025... back in key west under the influence of NOTHING BUT JOY
And now it is late phase February. PHASES CONTINUE! It seems this may just be life, strange as that is to admit.
stay with me, eh? this is a collection of raw material, and i can’t promise much beyond this: it won’t be boring.
5/20, Monday
Gray days. The sun retreats for four, five, seven days. There is rain but really no impressive storm, no clash of thunder or flash of lightning or howl of wind. Just a steady drizzle with spurts of heavier drops. And then there are the times of bright sky, you know, where you step outside and still feel the need for sunglasses despite the total hiding of the sun behind the blanket of clouds. Just a blanket of gray for days on end. Inevitably, the mood recedes from the high water mark. This can happen in varying degrees - sometimes it’s outright depressing after becoming a fat oozing slug trapped inside a dark dank cave for so many days, staying in prime slug condition with the small spurts outside for some little chore or errand when the rainwater can be absorbed through the gray slimy skin, just enough to keep the slug systems running. And sometimes it’s only a slight check on the spirits, reasons often unknowable, but perhaps there’s enough of the bright gray sky for a walk in the park, or perhaps you’re overdue for some extended time with the television and the couch and you don’t have to transform completely into a slime, or perhaps you’re just lucky and for the usual fluke cosmic reasons your mood doesn’t morph to match the amorphous gray blanket across the sky and you can continue on only slightly subconsciously stunted.
Gray days. The sun retreats for four, five, seven days. There is rain but really no impressive storm, no clash of thunder or flash of lightning or howl of wind. Just a steady drizzle with spurts of heavier drops. And then there are the times of bright sky, you know, where you step outside and still feel the need for sunglasses despite the total hiding of the sun behind the blanket of clouds. Just a blanket of gray for days on end. Inevitably, the mood recedes from the high water mark. This can happen in varying degrees - sometimes it’s outright depressing after becoming a fat oozing slug trapped inside a dark dank cave for so many days, staying in prime slug condition with the small spurts outside for some little chore or errand when the rainwater can be absorbed through the gray slimy skin, just enough to keep the slug systems running. And sometimes it’s only a slight check on the spirits, reasons often unknowable, but perhaps there’s enough of the bright gray sky for a walk in the park, or perhaps you’re overdue for some extended time with the television and the couch and you don’t have to transform completely into a slime, or perhaps you’re just lucky and for the usual fluke cosmic reasons your mood doesn’t morph to match the amorphous gray blanket across the sky and you can continue on only slightly subconsciously stunted.
Yeah, however slightly or severely the effects are felt for that particular stint, they are present. That’s just part of the gray days. There are moments of awareness throughout, but often, the gray blanket simply becomes the standard state of being, as if the maximum possible level of feeling has been reduced and so the lack of the upper ranges isn’t even noticed - those levels simply do not exist. And it goes on like that, mundanely so, until one big morning all of the sudden and all at once the gray blanket has dissipated, has been ripped back and off and the big bright blue is everywhere, and the sun shines down warm and truly bright, not that half-brightness of the reflective gray ceiling, but a shining shimmering thing that touches the skin sweetly, and the high sky and maybe clean distant wind reset the scale, and the upper levels are suddenly there and possible again, and almost instantly the dull gray days are a strange notion of the past, and the life of a wet lethargic slug seems like an impossibility, an absurdity, something comical even though it was something just lived and not so amusing while it happened… The gray days are there and they become the norm and then they are gone suddenly and completely, and it is not until then that the realization of just how abnormal that normal was can dawn. Life can become small, when the truth is it is always vast. Emerging from the dark cave, from under the heavy rock, a slug smiling in the sunlight under the big blue sky - it’s something sweet.
HERE IT COMES BUDDY!!
^^^ this is in France. I tend to exist emphatically outside of France. I was in France for one day with my girlfriend. We disembarked from a Very Big Boat in Marseille, and I asked the man to drop us off in the northwest corner of of the Old Port. He was a Russian man and he explained the allure of France very well. He had been in France for many years and he was leaving France very soon. Or was that in Spain with the allure of Spain and leaving Spain very soon? My head was and remains foggy to this day.
We hiked up many hills and haphazardly ducked into a Dutch coffee shop. After that brief stay we wandered and wandered and wandered and I took photographs that I though might be meaningful at a later time, and pigeons splashed in the near-empty fountain and we climbed our way back down to the Old Port itself and walked out to the far point and swung our legs over the sea and thought about how nice it might have been to be someone else in another place.
We hiked up many hills and haphazardly ducked into a Dutch coffee shop. After that brief stay we wandered and wandered and wandered and I took photographs that I though might be meaningful at a later time, and pigeons splashed in the near-empty fountain and we climbed our way back down to the Old Port itself and walked out to the far point and swung our legs over the sea and thought about how nice it might have been to be someone else in another place.
SATURDAY MORNINGS as we once knew them don’t have to be dead! There are enough other days and times to be taken with existential dread and a vague sense of impending doom. Saturday mornings, regardless of other life obligations, can be made to be sweet and pleasant and far away from everything else, at least some times... at least often enough to not be so sweet that they must be treated as some kind of supreme rarity, because of course that spoils whatever chance there was of it being really... enjoyable.
So I started surfing again in September after spending enough time recovering from the harsh shock of 7.5 years in the corporate consulting world and about 6-7 months of being a big cunt.
It’s tough to overcome a condition like that, as being a big cunt is not unknown to be terminal, or at least permanent.
But eventually, you just have to force it through... hence my purchase of the PARTY PLATTER.
So I started surfing again in September after spending enough time recovering from the harsh shock of 7.5 years in the corporate consulting world and about 6-7 months of being a big cunt.
It’s tough to overcome a condition like that, as being a big cunt is not unknown to be terminal, or at least permanent.
But eventually, you just have to force it through... hence my purchase of the PARTY PLATTER.
CAMP PHOTOS
Here we have a series of photographs taken on my Fujifilm Instax, scanned in, blown up, and lightly edited for digital viewing pleasure. Early October in Frisco after roughly 10 years not going there. 12 photo slide show so this shit doesn’t become too long of a scroll. You can click through at your own pace, though it will auto advance.
︎︎︎︎︎
10/20, Sunday
SHEESH - I’ve been busy, I’ve been on the go, but it’s been overarchingly good. Surfing, camping, diving, maintaining some level of general momentum on my large scale pursuit. Of course, there are still the stumbles and the downs all along the way, but when I crack open an archive - a journal from a year or three ago say - it grants me perspective. Yes, questions still abound, but by comparison to where I was, great progress has been made, and the path is not so… repulsive. Perhaps still daunting, but not repulsive.
A little benzodiazepine on a Sunday, duties all done, a strange canned drink to sip on, some combination of black tea and kava and kratom. Keep the blinds closed for the time being, set the lamps to blue and low, let Sunday Morning by the Velvet Underground play, try to wind down, down, down slow, slow, slow…
I don’t want any big questions to stalk me at a time like this so I have to keep my tracks covered, even from myself, lest I unknowingly leave some clue they can detect but I can’t even notice is there, and then next thing I know they’re leaping out of the shadowy brush snarling and clawing and gnashing great white dagger teeth thirsting for BLOOD - no, let’s take it easy, bud. Not worth the risk at a time like this. Ignorance is indeed bliss. Shut it all down for the time being - save it for tomorrow. I am no longer bound to the standard 9-5 schedule, but tomorrow is in fact Monday, and at this juncture it suits me to play along with the trope. IT ALL BEGINS MONDAY.
SHEESH - I’ve been busy, I’ve been on the go, but it’s been overarchingly good. Surfing, camping, diving, maintaining some level of general momentum on my large scale pursuit. Of course, there are still the stumbles and the downs all along the way, but when I crack open an archive - a journal from a year or three ago say - it grants me perspective. Yes, questions still abound, but by comparison to where I was, great progress has been made, and the path is not so… repulsive. Perhaps still daunting, but not repulsive.
A little benzodiazepine on a Sunday, duties all done, a strange canned drink to sip on, some combination of black tea and kava and kratom. Keep the blinds closed for the time being, set the lamps to blue and low, let Sunday Morning by the Velvet Underground play, try to wind down, down, down slow, slow, slow…
I don’t want any big questions to stalk me at a time like this so I have to keep my tracks covered, even from myself, lest I unknowingly leave some clue they can detect but I can’t even notice is there, and then next thing I know they’re leaping out of the shadowy brush snarling and clawing and gnashing great white dagger teeth thirsting for BLOOD - no, let’s take it easy, bud. Not worth the risk at a time like this. Ignorance is indeed bliss. Shut it all down for the time being - save it for tomorrow. I am no longer bound to the standard 9-5 schedule, but tomorrow is in fact Monday, and at this juncture it suits me to play along with the trope. IT ALL BEGINS MONDAY.
Yes… and the times remain strange and turbulent. We’re coming up on the Presidential Election now, and it’s a big one. THE FATE OF THE NATION! Meanwhile, the State of the Nation remains a strange combination of happy idiocy and general malaise - the American Way. Superficially superb, comforts and conveniences abound, all wrapped into our daily lives and so taken for granted and not seen as the immense luxuries they would have been just a few generations ago. And underneath that outer level, just a SMIDGE down into the ether, we’re wretched and ragged and near collapse, or perhaps not collapse, but something more explosive or implosive - something more dramatic and full of deep personal failings. A fresh layer of pavement over a sinkhole of unknown depth and breadth. That new Ford F-150 King Ranch looks DAZZLING as it passes over, dad being an American MAN, mom smiling in the sun, kids laughing in the backseat, small hairline fractures running and splaying out across the clean black tar beneath, but not tearing wide and breaking through and opening the gateway into oblivion just yet - and that’s all that matters. That new sparkling truck and happy happy family will pass by unscathed, and it won’t be until the next truck and family, or the next, or the next passes over that the great black hole appears and swallows them up and then lets no one pass at all for a great and unknown quantity of time. Yes, it’s inevitable that it will happen, and probably soon, but it’s not happening right now at this moment so it doesn’t matter, and even though maybe it does matter, it’s so hard to care when everything is new and shiny and smiling, and so who cares, really, who really has the time or the energy to care… THE AMERICAN WAY.
Yeah, true, but what the fuck do I know about it? I’m a little high on the couch gearing up to watch some fine fine TELEVISION for the evening. I’ve got leftover pizza in the fridge, pizza that took two hours to be delivered from six minutes away, from a pizza company whose anonymous corporate system politely told me to go fuck myself when I complained. Good pizza! Although they were also out of ranch. But I’ll eat the pizza and I’ll watch the television and I’ll lay on the couch next to my mold-laden wall that my leasing company will not fix or compensate me for in any way, and I’ll think to myself, hey, hey, not bad man, not a bad little life you’ve got here. Superficially superb, but just a smiiiiiidge down underneath, into the ether, where the big questions prowl around… Eh, what do I know? I’m not looking. Ignorance is bliss and I’m a blissful American Man.
JOLLY DOOM
11/19, Tuesday
As a child I had a crippling anxiety, a strange kind of constant writhing torment that stayed with me for a period of time, partly a potent obsessive compulsive disorder causing me to be terrified of strange things like accidentally lying to anybody, but many parts other things - an early form of the darkness that would come back to afflict me as a teenager, then more as a purple billowing cloud of depression.
Now, it is different, and I am glad for that. It is not the all-pervasive and all-permeating writhing thing that it was then. But I do still have a form of it. Now, it is more of a long-pulsating dread that rides beneath my psyche. Sometimes, between pulses, it is dull and distant. But when that pulse shoots out hard it can still send shockwaves through my system. The inside of my mind does not look like the outside presentation that I show the world. No, it is a harder thing to wrangle. It is not as terrifying as it was when I was a child, but I do have to regularly remind myself that everything is ok - it is actually ok. The dread and the doom that I feel do not have to carry their full weight. The weight can be dispersed, or counteracted - negated in some way, at least partially. But I have to work at this, fairly constantly. As time goes by and I move farther along in life I have begun to come to terms with this, realizing that it is just a part of my mind. It has to be managed - or, as I said before, wrangled - but it does not have to be allowed to run amuck. I do not wish to let it consume me and so I will not.
As a child I had a crippling anxiety, a strange kind of constant writhing torment that stayed with me for a period of time, partly a potent obsessive compulsive disorder causing me to be terrified of strange things like accidentally lying to anybody, but many parts other things - an early form of the darkness that would come back to afflict me as a teenager, then more as a purple billowing cloud of depression.
Now, it is different, and I am glad for that. It is not the all-pervasive and all-permeating writhing thing that it was then. But I do still have a form of it. Now, it is more of a long-pulsating dread that rides beneath my psyche. Sometimes, between pulses, it is dull and distant. But when that pulse shoots out hard it can still send shockwaves through my system. The inside of my mind does not look like the outside presentation that I show the world. No, it is a harder thing to wrangle. It is not as terrifying as it was when I was a child, but I do have to regularly remind myself that everything is ok - it is actually ok. The dread and the doom that I feel do not have to carry their full weight. The weight can be dispersed, or counteracted - negated in some way, at least partially. But I have to work at this, fairly constantly. As time goes by and I move farther along in life I have begun to come to terms with this, realizing that it is just a part of my mind. It has to be managed - or, as I said before, wrangled - but it does not have to be allowed to run amuck. I do not wish to let it consume me and so I will not.
It is not that simple, of course, and yet in some ways it is. Sometimes when you look inside and you see boiling turmoil and fervent stirring you just have to choose to let everything be ok. You have to choose it.
I creep up to the crossroads of life. I approach cautiously, peering around the corners, peeking about and assessing, finding a vantage point to perch upon and observe for a while. I must come to know the place, the conditions, the potential pathways. I must perform my calculus. On the outside, and sometimes even on the inside on the straightaways and the in-betweens, I move fast and hard, even with an apparent nonchalance. Good and easy and steady. But beneath that, on a stronger current, I must perform my calculus. Regardless of how long and drawn out it may be, it must be done.
I think it’s because of this that I sometimes feel like I am not making decisions in life, or perhaps that I’m simply being swept along by the current, allowing it to carry me rather than my own volition. This sentiment frustrates me greatly at times. But then, upon deeper analysis of the larger arc, the slow calculus becomes apparent. I am creeping up and observing and assessing - moving at my own pace. Sometimes this means I am slow to respond to external stimuli… to react to developments on the path. But then it also means that my longer path is intentional. It is not made by indecision or external current, really. It is the result of my own internal calculus, at my own pace. I may waver, but I do not cease to listen to my own internal rhythm.
There is a brand called Jolly Doom. I started it, and I have to remind myself at times that it is indeed my outward endeavor, and this website is indeed my INTERIOR AND CLOSE ASSOCIATES endeavor. When I say this out loud I am speaking quietly in a room by myself in a place that I haven’t really earned the right to be by myself- i.e. here and now, in the guest bedroom in my parents’ rented condo in Key West, at the relocated desk by the window by the permanently closed blinds facing out toward the condominium walkway and tonight the heavy moving clouds, constant but seemingly sporadic to all the people here that have learned to not expect clouds and to expect sun and moon. I do not know what the moon is doing - I leave that to my sister, though it seems to haunt me. No, I know that we have some kind of rare alignment of planets that is being talked about on the streets, but I know more acutely that we live on the same Earth under the same Sky and mysticism is far and gone away. Earlier tonight I watched a woman leave her bar chair - I thought she had had a bad conversation and was gradually making her way to the door. She pushed off of me two to three times as if I was a column supporting the wall, which is not unheard of, and then she stumbled outside and fell into the nearest single chair. Well, alright. Several people joked with the bartender that she had never settled up for her drink. I chortled along, and then… I went back inside to the restroom in the back of the bar and I hear a loud crash and general understated tones and exclamations of dismay. I knew what it must mean. The woman had fallen out of chair onto the floor of the bar. I emerged from the bathroom and looked out in the direction that I had come from - THOU SHALL NOT PASS. One individual made eye contact with me with a look of combined pity and bewilderment, and so I headed for the side door and came back to the table out front via the outdoor passageway.
Before I had ordered the additional hurricanes, which are made with a very integral shot of 151, I had ushered a nice Indian couple past me to the open bar stools in front of me. The barstools were open because two women had recently fled them - one to another barstool farther down and away from the woman rambling next to her, and the other woman rambling and then suddenly silent and withdrawn and dreadful, head bobbing up and down and then down only and body leading herself on autopilot to pass out in the chair on the porch just outside the door. Here she slept for a good while, benevolently ignored, until she stumbled back inside into a barstool with multiple woman trailing her with belongings shortly after. It was from there that she fell and struck her head on some kind of metal pole, proceeding to bleed across the floor profusely.
“Well,” I thought, “there’s worse things for business.”
And indeed there were. A characteristically understated Key West cop arrived first, followed by an ambulance and a fire truck. The nice Indian couple stood outside the door with their drinks and I asked them, myself only having seen the various limbs of the limp body, “Did she hit her head?”
“Yes!” the woman replied enthusiastically. “There is a lot of blood!”
I looked toward my parents knowingly and replied something along the lines of, “Well, there’s often a lot of blood with a head wound, but it’s often surficial.”
“Sure,” she replied, “but we had to get out of there for now.”
“Sure,” I said, and I watched the cop laugh with a passerby on the street.
The medics brought the woman out with her arms strapped across her body as if in prayer and her chin strapped down in that way that is only done for those with potential neck injuries. And yet when they blink their eyes and look around it seems very much like they likely don’t have a neck injury and they probably just fell over in a very bad way in a very public setting…
“There she goes,” the nice Indian woman said.
“I’m glad they got the backboard in there,” my mom said, referring to the woman’s spinal immobilization.
I watched the woman peering around the scene with vacant ghostly eyes and I shuddered. Had I not earned this right before - treatment as an invalid solely through choices of my own?
My dad looked on with a strange whimsical look in his eye and said something along the lines of, “Well, it seems like she’ll be alright at least.”
Yes, indeed. After that, before the police car and the ambulance and the fire truck left, small waves of individuals poured into the bar.
“Well, they must make them good here, he he ha!” one of the older wider bearded gentlemen said as he headed inside toward the bar with the now very nervous bartender.
My parents laughed, and so did I, because after all - he wasn’t wrong, was he?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“You’re still here?” he asked, with that falsely amused disagreeable expression on his face.
I did not know his name, and really I did not know anything about him, other than he was ornery and unamusing and really, quite obnoxious. I paused to look at his wide stupid face with its false grin and then I said, “Yeah, well, you’re still here, aren’t you?”
He laughed, not a real laugh, but that small kind of thing that serves to fill a space that would otherwise be filled with some authentic form of surprise.
I watched this with contempt, and then watched his beady little eyes flit away, and I turned back to the bartender. “Another round, please.”
I stared up at the TV behind the bar, and the wall and the bottles behind the bar, and really at nothing in particular, allowing myself the luxury of becoming lost in thought. That was when this unamusing lone man at the bar had to do it. He had been flirting very terribly with the bartender, and very unsuccessfully, and he thought that I had probably been amused by this at his expense, and now, although he hadn’t connected those dots and likely never would, he was angry with me because of it.
“Say, you’re not from here, are you?”
I looked at him with naked contempt. “No.”
“Where you from?”
“Virginia.”
“Cold up there, huh?”
“That’s right.”
“I’m from Alabama.”
“Alright.”
“Been here for sixteen years though.”
“Alright.”
“You know what brought me down here?”
I did not, and I refused to ever know. “You survive a plane crash?” I was ornery too now, but also whimsical.
“What’s that?”
“A plane crash. Were you stranded here after a plane crash?”
He looked at me quizzically, a mixture of simple irritation and legitimate confusion, and then said, “No. No, well, what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing,” I said, matter of factly, “You just seem like the kind of guy who would survive a plane crash when everyone else burned alive in the wreckage.”
He began to turn red and his face began to contort. “Hey! I’ll have you know buddy, I have a pilot’s license, alright? And as a matter of fact - ”
“Not anymore,” I cut him off. “I work for the FAA, and I can tell you right now, your license is revoked.”
His face turned redder and contorted further. “Now, what’s the meaning of this!?”
“Oh I’m sorry,” I responded, taking a sip of my drink that the bartender had just passed me, she looking immediately away afterwards. “You should have already gotten the notice in the mail. You didn’t receive it already?”
“Hey, you shut the fuck up now! You don’t be messing with me!”
“I wouldn’t dream of it, a serious man like you. And serious business like this. In fact, if I remember right, the FAA thinks you might have helped train the 9/11 hijackers - ring any bells?” He couldn’t have been more than a few years older than me, which would likely put him somewhere around the age of eleven in 2001. I took a heavy pull of my drink and felt the whisky burn my throat and make me shudder slightly.
His head turned into a bruised and battered tomato. “Slander!” he yelled to the nearly empty bar. “That’s slander! It’s not funny to slander a man like that!”
“As a matter of fact,” I said, the whisky now riding around happily in my belly, “I think the FAA administrator may have actually told me you worked with the big man himself.”
“What the hell you talking about!? Who’s that?”
“Osama Bin Laden.”
His distorted tomato head exploded. The few other bar patrons looked over in shocked horror, having not witnessed the build up that made this conclusion quite logical, and the bartender looked on with an odd mixture of general relief at the forefront, but with exasperation at the big mess just behind. I grabbed a stray napkin off the bar and wiped the worst of the rotten red exploded tomato off my face, then pulled out my phone, opened YouTube, and began to play the Veggie Tales theme song.
The opening tuba sound came on, and I hopped up on the bar, kicking off my shoes to reveal a hidden pair of tap shoes, clacking my feet along with the beat and singing the opening lyrics:
“If you like to talk to TOMATOES (this word I yelled),
if a squash can make you smile.
If you like to waltz with potatoes,
up and down the produce aisle…”
A pause, and then the few other bar patrons, no longer shocked or horrified, and the bartender, now only relieved, leapt onto the bar beside me, kicked off their shoes, revealing hidden pairs of tap shoes, and clacking along they screamed with me:
“HAVE WE GOT A SHOW FOR YOU!!!”
______________________________________________________________________________________________________
I was feeling quite literary. It was good to be writing with some frequency, whether or not I was writing anything worthwhile. It made it so I did not fear it anymore. Instead, it was more like a normal chore, something that I may not want to do but that I would be able to make myself do because I knew it had to be done and because I had gotten used to making myself do it. In that, it was like all things, and that is better than being afraid of it.
Here I am - I’m living this charmed life, by all available accounts and exterior metrics, and yet I can’t even fully enjoy it because I’m so wrapped up in my foolish fatalism. The menace of my own mortality hangs as a specter over my head. It is an ominous shadow, and it is a cartoonish anvil perched precariously on the edge of a cliff up above as I bound down the straight and narrow desert road. Ignorance is in fact bliss but there is no such veil for this kind of malice.
One of the most foolish parts of my foolish fatalism was my tendency to allow myself to feel preemptive sorrow. Things that had not happened and that perhaps would not happen or at the very least would only happen much later and so nearly abstractly would materialize in my mind and sink down over me like a dense pre dawn fog. Some part of my mind, often not the forefront but also not an insignificant part, would then be taken with this fog, despite the fact that the world of reality before me and around me would not have fog and may in fact actually be clear and have sun. I knew there was no nonsensical reconciliation of the two, but then apparently, there didn’t need to be, as I was perfectly capable of straddling the two realms, lurking along the invisible precipice like some kind of strangely fluid ghoul.