Pitbull of the Steppes's blog: "Ramblings Away from Oregon"

I think I let just about everything I wrote last night close with the computer, lost in the ether; this time of year there are a lot of half assed wishes and visions of sugar plums and resolutions floating around in the ether. I’m guessing those released happy little, sticky sweet thoughts give my dark things a wide berth; even the lost things shun the unclean.

I am so tired of thinking or writing or talking about my dubious physical health and my tenuous, precarious mental health, that I’m on the verge of talking about yours. This is a safe place as there’s too many of you. Some folks haven’t escaped that. Some folks were lucky things were in the ether.

Know all those “I can’t lose my shit here?” entries. Apparently I can. When I come out the other side I suppose I’ll be a Michigander. That’s the way institutions in the states, perhaps everywhere do it, break down the individual and when he becomes a lost little lamb take him into the fold.

Been unable to access the horror of my sole comfort, twisted little pieces of archaic fiction, the dissembling of my sub conscious sans dreams. I always have this fear too much will spill over, and sometimes have the fear the well has gone dry. Thousands of years ago and hundreds of thousands of miles ago I sat at this same desk, but the keyboard was a manual typewriter. On Onion skin paper some vowels left holes. From time to time someone has a box of those things they try giving back to me, along with littl0, e hard back blue journals with poems scrawled in the margin from the shoulder of the Al-Can, or Hwy 10, 84, 80, 90, 94, 2. Blue highways without names, 66, 495, trans can, hwy to the sun, the sunset, the I-5 corridor.

I’ve been on OD for almost a fifth of my life, and bled on these digital pages, or ribbed or ranted or caused trouble. I don’t know if it’s better or worse. Some things are better off scattered to the winds. I know it isn’t a shock to y’all, but objectively, that I have a lifetime membership to a terminal site gifted three days before suicide by cop by a woman I never met, well; it’s sort of a metaphor for my life in general. It’s not the sort of thing that happens often. All my stories are like that; either straining credulity but absolutely true or they take on epic proportions by sheer weight of observation.

I’m a bit like the hero in Wings of Desire, doomed to witness the resilient and fragile make up of mankind through a filter of limited participation. Ah, maybe not, I’ve participated. Christ knows I’ve tried to disassociate, sometimes not by my own choice, and am pulled in; again, either a gift or a burden.

There is a way of describing society, which is a grouping of people who agree on a set of boundaries, as a series of cords, bonds that inextricably entangle people in the process of being people. I thought I was going somewhere with that. I’m mistaken. My five day course of prednisone has an eight day tapering off. Perhaps we pay for every gift with blood and sweat and tears. I loved their first album --- Troubles are many they’re as deep as a well, I can swear there ain’t no heaven but I pray there ain’t no hell, can’t know from living only my dying will tell ---

Yeah, no, I’m not dying. I could justify the morbid thoughts in my head if I were. You know something? Going all logical is cold comfort, telling yourself it’s just brain chemistry doesn’t seem to allow you go “Oh, well, that’s ok then”.

I really want to write fiction. That’s not how it works though. It’s like really wanting to have a sex dream; you lay down your head or you sit at a keyboard and the rest happens. I mean I could force fiction, but that’s not what I mean at all. I need to decompress in the only way I know how, well, the only way I know how that really works, when it works. Yes, I know grand things, profound themes, I know the process of telling a tale; it’s just a marshmallow without the fire.

At least I am allowed to sleep now, another gift from an unlikely source. All I’m in danger of now is pain. It’s much easier to deal with, much less incapacitating, much more human than the weird shit between my ears. I guess I can lose my shit here, I can’t spill over.  I don’t know.

It’s pretty outside, a blanket of snow and pale gold sunshine. I am home; I am a long way from home. I am blessed and perhaps damned. I have dark tobaccos and light tobaccos and fine Irish whiskey. Warm comfort, but with a price, I am not sober enough to get inebriated.

And the question you need ask is who will say this too and who will say this to you “Run, no questions” and take your hand. Though predictable it really is beside the point; NRA and second amendment things. Gun control does not make crazies channel their energies into more productive activities. Most of us grew up with strict drug control; most of us know where to find gray and black market drugs. I’m not saying “If you outlaw guns only outlaws will have guns” I’m saying when motherfuckers start shooting up the joint waving a law at them is frivolous.

The only salient point is how to protect you and yours. I don’t want a “good defense is a good offense” type speech; the ones most likely to do that here are the ones most likely to get their weapons taken from them. What I am saying is that so far December has been rife with national and personal tragedies, national as in any nation you might be living in. Think hard about how many people you know who are really doing fine right now. Yeah; me either.

I was just doing gallows humor with the few entries about apocalypses and such. There was a kind of stick up the butt philosopher a few centuries back who had this sort of God theory that God doesn’t have to be Omni anything, he just has to be slicker than us to seem Omni, that he might have set up contrivances to keep things going (e.g. wind and seeds and rain and fertile earth, that way he doesn’t have to plant everything and keep his eye on every fucking sparrow). I’m not championing the cause of that philosophy, but in the context of recent events; it’s doesn’t have to be a worldwide end of times apocalypse to really fuck up your world, it just has to be personal.

And so the question is who will go with you no questions, who will you grab anyhow, who will take you? I’m not saying it’s going to come to that, but I’m not saying it quite as loud as I might have earlier in the year. Just saying, if you want to be a hero, be a hero, you don’t want your loved ones being heroes though. As a friend pointed out, the shooting in Clackamas were a little too close to home, a place we knew, a bit like a home invasion, there is a sense of intrusion. Connecticut; more horror less personal investment. But these things seem to be escalating, add that to your own personal losses, and you aren’t that far from the Town Center or Newton.

Without doing anything we are witnessing the crumbling of … something. Law is too slow, if the pace is maintains, the idiot pontificating on the dais is just going to be a target. All those neat little things on paper that imply punishment for abhorrent behavior don’t mean shit to the guy who isn’t planning on coming out the other side.

Yes, I know, this is ramblings from Oregon (ok, once removed) and y’all expected some sort of mourning, some plea for peace, for centering of the human psyche. Yeah, that doesn’t work on crazies any more than legislation does. Ask the question “Will you run with me, no questions?” or answer it. We aren’t really lucky enough for the 21^st to be the end of the world, so you might need to know what you’ll be doing on the 22^nd and who’ll be doing it with you. Ho Ho Ho. Just saying. And I’m spent (hopefully just figuratively).

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you --- Conventional Wisdom, public domain. 

Crippled and set to the boulevard, cast casually and malice of afterthought, a muscle relaxer in the maw of a black bird, I thought you knew I’d come, come for the lost things. I thought you knew.

I forgot my number, my place, forgot the attitude to keep me safe (though I never played that hand too well, and always bluffed my way to poverty). All I could remember once were the lost things, like papers blown into bridge caverns then swirling until it’s time to go, flying blind down streets, over fences, and then going where lost things go.

I am a lost thing.

“My,” they say sometimes behind me, “He doesn’t seem like that, no not like that at all”.

And sometimes it’s said to my face, as though I were a ghost image, a negative, some pastiche of someone they thought they knew that had gone all lost thing on them, like that stanza to that song, or that blurred photograph of someone they had their arms around, but carelessly and loose.

Oh god, not again. If I knew he was coming, I’d … Christ I don’t know, I would have made more of my time, written that book, dropped more acid, fucked my dead.

Why would he come here all ragged and burnt, like some black bird from a field fire? I didn’t ask for this, this lost thing, this dim vapor. I’ve walked my walk and sung my song, kicked an old can down the tracks, lived my life as basically a good man, so can’t I go on?

“So, Dawg, How ya doing?”

“I’m all right, Hare, I’m just all right. You?”

Aquarius rising in a pale sky against cheery blossoms, black bird perched on the constellation like a harbinger of nothing, an omen of being an omen, a portent of black bird. This is the way we step inside.

Last night I took one of my more nostalgic pipes, a large pot with a wide open draw, opened an old tin of Escudo, a round disk shaped tobacco with a black center, and eased into the comfort of the slow draw and the lazy smoke encircling my head. Two days ago I took a rare couple of Xanax during the day, actually using them for anxiety.

Christmas 2012 might be marked by things other than Peace on Earth, Good Will, the economy hanging by a thread on how many presents are under trees, Jesus’s birthday, fat jolly geriatrics in a convertible rig pulled by Norwegian deer. It might be marked by the complete unraveling of this old dawg.

I have medical charts out in the wind and a singular lack of phone calls telling me to come on in on such a such date. Sunny seems to have disappeared; I can’t get divorced without her. I haven’t been able to feel the two most driver side fingers or the palm beneath them in my driver’s side paw for over two months now, maybe three. In a week I will run out of my artificial means of sleep and have no natural means.

What about the person I do Not Speak Of directly here? Laid up with back spasms. It’s more complicated than it sounds.

Merry motherfucking Christmas yo.

Ah, I’m just being difficult; I don’t really have any feelings about this Christmas one way or the other. It hasn’t really gotten in my way. I also haven’t really participated but don’t have any particular guilt about it either. There will be a convergence of odd vibes, yeah I know, how much odder could it get, coming to town here close to the tis the season to be jolly season.

I am a cynical optimist, like anyone else who uses any combination of those descriptors, I think of myself as a realist. We’re all mistaken. At best reality is sort of subjective, these are not “at best” times. If reality were a bell curve both feet would be touching and making a valentines heart shape.  Yes, I am suggesting things are bent. I would love to suggest it’s just me, I would take the hit for the team, the human race that is, but I can’t in all honesty make that suggestion. I’m just a witness to at least half the weird shit going on in the world, and have been so absorbed in my own and my loved ones that I’m not even a reliable witness to the worlds weird shit, but it looks like every earth blind rabid thing is crawling out of their holes in the ground and in the human psyche.

Not trying to scare anyone, though if you aren’t already scared you either haven’t been paying attention or you are shaking the dirt from the fur covering your eyes. I guess it’s my penance for not participating in October flash Friday horror flashes. December has decided to be flash non-fiction horror month. Worse yet, my phone and computer only have daylight savings automatic settings; there is no setting for the apocalypse. I don’t even know how to hedge my apocalypse bets; do I accept Jesus in my heart? Should I bring a mountain to Muhammad? Sit under a Cyprus tree (Shit, that’s not right is it?) like Buddha? Pretend Darwin really is the father of modern atheism? Or do I really need to make a bloody shrine to Quetzalcoatl? Ra? Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva? I really need more Ativan for the apocalypse.

Happy Holidays y’all. Strap in, it’s going to be a bumpy ride. You must be as tall as Mickeys hand to ride the end of times.