Voices in my Head

I live in a little box. It is cold in here. I patter around barefoot or sockfoot but I can’t leave. They won’t let me. The voices won’t. I hear voices. They talk to me in the middle of the night when no one is around. When I am in my little cold box they talk to me. They tell me what to do sometimes. I like the voices. Because they tell me what to do. You don’t have to think when the voices tell you what to do. Unless you think you don’t want to do it. But that would make you contrary. I don’t want to be contrary. I do what the voices tell me. Sometimes I write it down. I write down what they tell me. Sometimes I just push buttons. I like buttons. They make sense. You push a button and something happens. A door opens, a noise stops, a light turns on. Buttons make sense. I like them. I don’t see them. The voices. I see the buttons. I see them to press them. The buttons. But the voices I don’t see. They don’t have faces. They don’t have names. They have numbers instead. I like numbers. They don’t make sense. Numbers don’t. Voices make sense. Like buttons. The voices are all different. They talk to each other and they let me listen. They call each other numbers. They are nice voices. Sometimes they call me numbers too. I like numbers. They don’t make sense. I like voices too. Sometimes the voices switch numbers. Then they don’t make sense. The voices don’t. The numbers do. Then I am confused. When they switch. It is usually voices that I like to talk to that switch numbers. I think they switch so that they can talk not to me. But they are silly voices because I can still hear them. When you only know a voice by the voice the number doesn’t matter. Voices are silly. They don’t make sense. Maybe the voices are just being contrary. I don’t talk to them when they switch numbers. I don’t like contrary voices. I don’t like my box either. It is cold in here. But the voices won’t let me leave. Contrary voices. I don’t like voices.

-Jn
Pienso que me vuelvo loco despacio.

A summer book...

The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp. Winston fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil. Actually he was not used to writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything into the speakwrite which was of course impossible for his present purpose. He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:

April 4th, 1984. (...)

For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The telescreen had changed over to strident military music. It was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say. For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years. At this moment, however, even the monologue had dried up. Moreover his varicose ulcer had begun itching unbearably. He dared not scratch it, because if he did so it always became inflamed. The seconds were ticking by. He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.

George Orwell, 1984

Live dizzy

Sick and Dizzy (06/22/06 RRC in the morning)

maybe love is what love does but
love never is what it once was
and the spirals curl harder
and drop deeper faster
dizzying disaster
and down
down
d..
.

Peace Kept

I have an important job more or less. If there is an emergency I need to be prepared, alert, attentive, detail oriented, observant, clear-headed and all sorts of other words that you put on a resume. All of the important campus alarms travel through unknown wires and end up within an arms reach of my desk. However, sometimes important events bypass alarm channels and sneak in through the scanner, hence the need to be prepared, alert and all those other things. May I also add that one should be paying FULL attention at all times. Yeah that one is tricky on less than 4 hours of sleep, with not all of the hours sequentially oriented.

If you are curious, overnights get lonesome and boring, so I have often wondered (at least once I’m sure) how to get a group of police officers together for a party and games. Tonight just seemed like a stellar night for some cacophonous and red-and-blue-lit fun. Apparently it was. In fact, it was so nice a night that 8 friendly, neighborhood departments came to play. They even brought a pretty (very happy) pooch. I would love to spill juicy details but come on; we all know that what happens at a party stays at the party. But just in case you were planning on hosting an event of this magnitude here is what you need in your own back yard, some stolen things, some vandalized things, some drunken things, some run over things and pretty flashing lights. Also mad props to those who found the stolen car before it was ‘stolen’ cough104coughcough.

By the way the Earth Fault has been “disabled”. I am going to go out on a limb here and say I don’t think disabling a fault is the same as fixing it. This might mean that the world is still over. I wouldn’t unpack yet. On the up side though, the world has finally stopped beeping..................-Jn

(Also, to the man who just called in and tried to make me feel incompetent, it didn’t work and you can go kick yourself in the face.)

Keeping Peace

I have an important job more or less. If there is an emergency I need to be prepared, alert, attentive, detail oriented, observant, clear-headed and all sorts of other words that you put on a resume. (Perhaps we should underline the ‘if’...there now it looks better.) All of the important campus alarms travel through unknown wires and end up within an arms reach of my desk. I suppose that sounds funny a noise being in arms reach. What I mean is that the alarms come from speakers attached to computers with view screens and buttons and that these are all accessible with a swivel of a chair and a slight stretch. A lot of important alarms come in with pomp and ceremony, vim and vigor. I swivel, I read, I acknowledge, I dispatch, I save the world. Fire alarms are a good example. When someone burns their popcorn I make sure the fire trucks know where to go.

A lot of slightly less important alarms also come in with pomp and ceremony, vim and vigor. Earth Faults are a good example. Now an earth fault sounds pretty memorable. I mean if your earth just stopped working you would want to take note, right? You would perhaps assign it to come in on two separate panels incase one was not working properly due to the impending end of the world and you would give it a magical ability to clear itself since you trust that the world might right itself before the appropriate authorities arrived and you wouldn’t want too many people to get into a tizzy when the world is taking care of itself. And you would think, wouldn’t you, that the earth wouldn’t commit suicide very often either. You would be wrong.

Let’s pause and play a little math game for a moment. There are a lot of minutes in an hour. Let’s say that the average hour has 60 of them. For an 8 hour shift that makes 480 minutes. There are 3, 8-hour shifts a day for a total of 1440 minutes more or less. Now everyone knows that I have a propensity towards exaggeration (this is my good Kerry blood.) However, since 1818 of the day before yesterday the earth has faulted albeit irregularly an average of once a minute. A veces, there are less than 30 seconds between faulty earths but there is never more than 5 minutes. This fact can be scientifically and officially backed by 104. At the end of my shift 2262 minutes will have transpired since 1818 (~920 figuring into my paycheck). But wait, there’s more. Each time the earth slits it’s wrists it quickly applies a band-aid and the system clears itself in usually less than 3 seconds. However, both alarms still require me to push a button to shut them up. If you are keeping score that would be 4524 button presses (1840 for yours truly). At this point in the evening (morning for you less time challenged folk) I don’t swivel, I don’t read, I don’t dispatch, I don’t even recognize that I reach for the F4 button when I hear the whine start up anymore. This morning when I stumbled in late at 1240 I was assured that the problem was examined sometime after my shift and I assume reasoned unfixable or unfindable because it is still in existence. The approximate time for the grand finale is still unknown but it is only a matter of time.

The Earth has Faulted. Earth=Over thanks to Gordon College and nothing can be done. I hope your bags are packed.

Oh and by the way, 104, I quit…but not because of the alarms.

bienvenidos a la mañana

Pienso que yo debería escribir pero no sé que palabras usar.

Hay tiempos cuando quiero ir a las montañas; en otros tiempos quiero ir a la playa y el mar. Pero no hay muchas veces cuando soy feliz. Para la semana pasada, soñado con cosas tropicales. El Río de las Piedras, la Bahía de Trujillo, y la selva tropical. Ah, los árboles. Árboles mucho más grandes que las casas. Los árboles que son casas. Casas de ranas, casas de aves, casas de lagartos y murciélagos, casas de mi corazón y alma. Tengo que volver.

Mi madre me conoce y comprado un libro sobre América Central. Pero El Hombre, que sólo se preocupa por el dinero y trabajo, lo arrebató. Ahora, estoy en el trabajo y grito y sueño. Por la mañana... habrá un libro por la mañana.

"weekend" statistics

6/14/06
0000-0800 work
0830-1630 pack/clean
1630-2230 sleep
2330-0930 Drive
6/15/06
0930-1030 Breakfast
1045-1230 Hike, Climb (Mill)
1300-1400 QSL
1430-1700 Sleep
1700-1730 Sarah Ruth
1800-1900 Dinner
1900-2100 Fire Arms/ random family
2130-0000 NNG, Dessert, Black n Tan
6/16/06
0000-0100 Cribbage
0130-0930 Sleep
1000-1030 Breakfast
1030-1230 Pack
1230-2230 Drive
2300-2330 Sleep
6/17/06
0000-... Work

Hours on the road 20
Hours at home 27
Hours of sleep in the past +3 days 16
Miles on the car ~1250
Shotgun cartriges shot ~50
Clay pidgeons hit 2
Groundhogs hit 0
Kittens tormented 5
4-leafed clovers found 2
Calories consumed 32489079826734
Presents received with thank-you notes forgotten 1 (shoot)
Other items forgotten >5

Time is spelled with 4 letters

So about that time I got busy and creativity started to stop. And I wrote bits and pieces but that was all and all I could find from everyone else. And I was going tonight to write and to complain about how creativity creates and without someone else's words to read there is no sense in writing or it becomes hard...I think I'm rambling. Lets try again.

The topic of the night was set to be how creativity breeds creativity. It would have been colored with my sadness in regards to the fact that most of my contemporary and more current sources of reading material had also dried up and I had had but little time to read much of anything extraneous over the past month. I was going to call on friends and neighbors to at least scribble once and a while. Also now that I have oodles of time to read* the fear is that I will lack the life experiences needed to spice the words in new ways.

The problem is this. Yunz all (or at least a collection of you) put down some words...some mighty good words and I was left tripping over mine and complaining about how now I would have to write and my very topic had been snatched from me. So I wrote anyways. And it felt good. And I think I will write some more.

As an update that I feel is needed...The HHH has fragmented and my classmates have gone separate ways, to there families and their jobs and evenings not spent studying taxonomy. We learned a lot and it was hard and challenging and everything it is supposed to be according to the brochure and living together was no different. I think we might be better at the class than living together but we tried real hard so we at least get effort points. We had talks about all sorts of things ranging from alcohol to pissing contests to multidimensional words. These are good things. Today* I will be heading in a homewards direction to move a quantity of my stuff back in. Seems when one has moved out and stocked a house and then has to move in to a small 'room for rent' there is a lot of extra stuff that one does not need...like a ping pong table. If you hadn't gathered, I am moving from my HHH on the marsh to a bright yellow room with two windows and a well seasoned woman who lives downstairs. One of my officers actually lived there for a few years before he got married so I feel it was a good selection. It is much closer to the school with translates into more time spent on more valuable things like sleeping and folding socks...or that I can bike to work in the morning*. I can also stay indefinitely on the outside chance that I get a job in the area and as a bonus several of my friends live nearby. Again- Good things.

And finally the reason for all the *s... As JJ put it when he woke me up yesterday night* "Jesus, right now you are Fcked up 6 different ways" I am working overnights full time for the summer. I have been working on translating my sleep schedule and my body has adjusted fine. 2230 hrs is a splendid time to wake up. The problem is that my days get very confused. For instance, two days (Calendar dates) ago JJ woke me up and I came in to work, I worked yesterday in the morning, both the technical smack-your-smart-ass-kid-in-the-face morning and my morning, then I went home did some chores and was bored until JJ woke up. This was his morning but my late afternoon/evening. We ran some errands and he ate lunch. Had I eaten anything it would have been like an after dinner snack but I couldn't convince myself that I was hungry. I rolled in to bed between 1500 hrs and 1600 hrs and it was a late night for me. At that point JJ took a shower and went to work as it was late afternoon for him. I woke up at 2230 hrs in the morning and started getting ready for my day. JJ came home around 2300 hrs and started winding down to go to bed. So when I say I am leaving for home today...it is a calendar today and not my today. I will sleep before I leave so as far as I am concerned I am leaving tomorrow as soon as I wake up. All of this works fine on paper and seems relatively logical but when you try having a conversation using the relative time words like today, tomorrow, morning, night, and bed time, it all pretty much falls to pieces and my Kt becomes worried that I am not sleeping at all. Maybe those words aren't actually relative...maybe that is my whole problem. ::Shrug:: Enough of this.


When my words have gone away (RRC 6/14/06)

Sometime between now and then
The prose dried up
And the poetry trickled
And the soul became dry without words
The tears couldn’t fall
And shaking was all
There was to make of the
Whatever was wrong
Not even song seemed to touch
Or maybe it was that time
Had been snatched away by busy
Or perchance space with stuff
And alone with friends
All good things can turn in the end
And there were still no words
Dry sobs heard on humid nights
And they wonder why I’ve started to tick
Why I jump and bite and scream
It’s just that I have these feelings
It’s just that I have bad dreams
And with no words to wrap them
They stand to threaten
Ugly and naked and harsh
When I close my eyes
And when it gets dark
Because my words have gone away

-Jn

Which begs the question,

Which is better...

Attack Kittens


-OR-

Attack Chickens?


Think fast. Poor Pedro's life depends on it.

Live from MBI

So as a part of class today we were asked to write for a bit about something along the lines of Salt Marsh Elegy by Aldo Leapold. Then we each read our little bits. It was more than a little bit deep. Yeah...This little bit is mine. If everyone else is game I will provide bits from my colleagues in a bit but as we just did this...you're just gonna have to wait.

These people, they are beautiful and with their empty longing eyes. They only want for their children and their children’s children, and so they cut the trees. Not because they do not care or do not understand but because they can do nothing else when they hear a hungry child’s cries And they plant what they can and tend and care with all the time and emotion they can afford to invest- still saving time for their children, the children with the hungry eyes. And so they gather their sweat and blood in time and they sell to the man who comes with the truck. The prices are low but will another man come? Who is to say and the children are hungry tonight. And so they burn what is left trying to preserve what goodness the soil still holds in any way possible, but the ghosts of the ancient forest trees can only help the soil for so long after they are gone and smoldering piles amount to little or nothing at all. And the children are hungry so the land is sold, the price is low but what can be done. And the home is moved ever inward, chasing the great giant trees and mourning their passing with plows and funeral pyres. Smoke rising to the heavens as if in solemn prayer, acrid and stinging smoke an excuse for tears, God we do not want it this way, these ugly dark scars on your earth, but our children are hungry…