Been a long time since a post but I know a lot of people are interested to know where I am as far as disability goes and there is good news: I got it, apparently. I'm not swimming in money or anything yet but I got a letter today that said the judge approves and I have a meeting with some guy friday to finalize some papers for SSI and medicaid compensation. So yeah, good news. Cheers.

Writing is a bitch, it really is. You can get praise from whatever quarter and still, when it comes down to putting it out there, or trying, everything you've written is piss to be swallowed by horrors of the deep and forgotten. I wonder if there's ever a time in a writer's career where that effect is dampened at least some. This seriously happens to me every time. I remember a long time ago I received praise on some work I did from Ryan Glenn and he wanted to take a look some more and so Matt Trowbridge came to my (Ben K.'s) house to pick it up and as I was staring at the computer screen I got a case of the this is shits and wouldn't turn it over. So I just did the same thing with some poems I'm submitting to a magazine except I actually handed them over this time. We'll see how they're perceived.

I turned on Window by the Album Leaf and felt like doing top fives.

Favorite Albums
1 - Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Lift your skinny wrists like antennas to heaven.
2 - Converge - Jane Doe
3 - Explosions in the Sky - Those who tell the truth shall die, those who tell the truth shall live forever
4 - The Album Leaf - In a safe place
5 - The Get Up Kids/Coalesce - Split 7"

Favorite Books
1 - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - 100 Years of Solitude
2 - Gary Snyder - The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations
3 - J.D. Salinger - 9 Stories
4 - William Burroughs - Naked Lunch
5 - James Joyce- Ulysses
(an honorable mention for only ever coming to me in book form, and fitting nearly anywhere on the list is Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett)

Favorite characters to play while one is interacting with plain people (without, of course, audio or visual cues)
1 - River Tam
2 - Spike Spiegel
3 - Remedios the Beautiful
4 - The Joker
5 - Rand Al'Thor

Favorite Sweats
1 - Chi sau with an attractive and deadly woman
2 - Mushrooms
3 - Road-trip car seat
4 - Attractive actress on the screen doing over the top attractive shit, although I please don't mean just boobies flying eveywhere
5 - Wing chun form exercise and practice

Favorite Movies
1 - 2001, A Space Odyssey
2 - The Royal Tenenbaums (it must tie with Moonrise Kingdom but take only one slot)
3 - Black Swan
4 - Edward Scissorhands
5 - The Dark Knight Returns, but only for the Joker (people probably do this a lot)

Favorite Television Series'
1 - Firefly
2 - Buffy the Vampire Slayer
3 - Heroes
4 - Star Trek - The Next Generation
5 - Dexter

Least Favorite Mental Illnesses
1 - Schizophrenia
2 - Schizophrenia
3 - Schizophrenia
4 - Schizophrenia
5 - Schizophrenia
(for the drinking game)

Hope that was informative.

I watched Dark Shadows and felt a tickle somewhere for 70s love but I'm finding it hard to dedicate myself to an idea or ideal lately, mostly because I am somewhere between fuck it and let it be. I don't know if this is a bad thing at all, but I feel like I need a parental figure to pat my shoulder and tell me it's okay. As far as the buddhist possibilities of the state go, I don't know if I match up. I still want to be with people on an instinctual level, such that absence makes the heart get angry, and I still desire a wild ride, as it were, where I've been counseled by scripture to accept the regular. I can't do that thing where my eyes glaze over and I go "this IS the wild ride" although I imagine if I did it in the right company and with the right allocation of drugs I could start a movement or religion or something else, as if that isn't how all of those things happen anyways. I spend a good amount of my time not wanting anything, which I think is what the goal is, but I struggle with what I've mentioned, as well as the desire for food and etc, wondering if I should try and purge myself of all these things and I think the answer is no, you just accept it and move on. The wild ride might be an exception...perhaps this IS the wild ride...................................................but yeah, who knows. I know for sure that I'd be less of a fuck it and more of a let it be if I didn't get my baptist training as a child. MUST BUDDHA LEST BE SATAN'd, etc. I heard about some woman in the literary community who had to get a therapist to help purge her of shit she'd learned in sunday school and the like because it was ruining her life and I might need to sign up. Because to better Buddha. Because Satan. Anyways, it's a vicious minefield in my mind..field haha and that's mostly the field up there. That and I have guilt issues now for things I haven't done that voices I've heard have worked towards convincing me I have, but this is minor because I can just ignore them and not go to the certain prison I'd go to if they were correct, and etc. Also what are you supposed to do with that feeling of wanting to DO SOMETHING. Do we just tamp that down? I imagine so. Or maybe that goes away with the Satan. I don't know, I'm so fucked up.

There is only ever one person in the world.

I was reading over a very old post of my brothers' in his blog and he wrote about the concept of wanting to be great at either lots of things or one thing supergreat....essentially. So I want the latter, because I want to wrangle the fuck out of this life but I can't figure out what I want to do and that's been plaguing me since I started thinking about career paths. And this doesn't even have to be a career, mind, just a something. But here, let's examine: I act. Yeah it sounds cheesy but I LARP and play RPGs and while it's nothing like theatre acting or television/movie acting it's still something like them, right? I play characters, I get into character, I change my voice and personality and etc etc which so I'm acting, to some extent. Could I do THAT? I think no, because schizophrenia. I think I can tell you why if you just sound up the Entertainment Tonight theme song. I write. I write here. I've written poems, plays. Nothing has ever gone anywhere but that doesn't mean it's bad, necessarily, or that I wont be able to write something that brings me over that hump into doing that thing amazingly. Disclaimer: I'm not going to say because schizophrenia at everything. But writing - awkward because schizophrenia. I have a difficult time seeing into the mind of your average Joe because mine is so flip turned upside down. I think I can DO it, I just think it needs a ton of work, and I think if I ever write anything ultra-fantastic it'll be odd and accessible only to a minority. Also, the thing with writing is I never really asked for The Darkness, it was just kinda foisted upon me. I did it a lot so I know some ins and outs but still: foist. The scholarly path, bless my friends who be upon it, doesn't really interest me. Philosophy to an extent; I'd love to be wearing Woodard's shoes, but I can't get up there at all. Because schizophrenia. No but in all seriousness I have problems with classes like you wouldn't believe. I used to chew through those monsters in high school and a bit of college but once the shit started setting in my aptitude melted. Not that I can't take a standardized test, or write an essay. I just can't bear a class. Note while reading that if you have any ideas on any of this please be forward with them. Internet classes? I don't know. I haven't explored it but I've basically mined my student loan potential so I don't know how I'd do it. Potentially schizophrenia scholarship? Seriously play the drinking game. The schizophrenia pays off: two shots. So where this leads is potentially to a similar place as Woodard, with publications and exhibitions and the whole nine yards and by the way congratulations my friend you are putting a dent in it. I could dig doing something similar. Other paths are a little sad and I feel unworthy of my time, if fun and interesting. Those being Magic: The Gathering and League of Legends. I do both a bit mediocre as far as the competitive bar is concerned and the only way to make it is to grind your way there which is less of a journey and more of a bite cheese, receive shock, move on type of thing. I have a feeling I'm going to get this all hashed out with my brother, or perhaps my friends, and maybe something will come of it. Probably something will come of it. Stay tchuned.

So I hear a voice asking me what they did to me and immediately the floodgates open and I'm about to cry and I start telling this voice and then I realize it's a voice....that I'm hearing...doing the asking, only about three minutes later. This is more twisted than it seems, I promise, unless it seems very twisted. I have a hard time figuring out what emotions I'm going to evoke now that all of mine are flip turned upside down. I made some nasty facebook about not getting invited to Grant and Joanie's wedding but whatever, perhaps I was forgotten, perhaps not considered because potential mood destroyer, perhaps many things, but I apologize for the nasty facebook anyway, if anyone reading this noticed it. I'm going to delete it after I write this blog. swear like floodgates, you know how when you cry from your shoulders. God that fucking pisses me off. I also got a mohawk back in a bit of a fugue after I asked all of my friends why I wouldn't be invited. It played a miniature role. You also can't style a receding hairline it's fucking impossible, except that when you look at it casually it looks just fine but you're in the mirror every goddamn second just prodding at that shit and it never looks right and I can't handle it so mohawk. I also want piercings and tattoos if anyone wants to donate to the fund. Ask me how to donate to the fund, we'll get something worked out.