Places that you've become holy.

It's been over a year. At some point, that was a mistake, but then once it went over a certain period of time, I figured I needed a break from always needing to write something down or react to something. It didn't help and it didn't hurt. I found somewhere between then and now through being a parent that I am part of a community. That the people around me are going to see me in the town and in the city and in the world and it's going to matter how I treat them or others who know them. I don't know how that concept never really effected me before. But being a parent who attended practices and games, etc. this sort of reality became clear. It made home feel more like home. It made here feel more like here. It made 3 years of always daydreaming of going back to NY disappear. Total relief, honest.

Found myself in a strange place after the last couple of weeks. I had (and still have) a bunch of PTO to burn up and I took some extra time. And the time that I had away from the store was spent more or less existing. Not accomplishing much outside of little bursts. Even the amount of media I was consuming started running together. Much of it felt distracted, sort of floating between two things, never really being consumed by any of it, overall. A few writing projects hovered before me and never landed on ledges. I can only imagine that this is what ADD feels like. Maybe we all have it, but we don't have the time to flex it. There's just so much out there.

Tomorrow, when I'm asked "What's up man. How was your day off?" and I say, "Good, man. Solid." and they ask, "Word! What'd you do?" What's my answer more likely to be?

Answer #1.
Watched all my shows from the weekend. Caught up. My Hero Academia was a filler episode so it felt a little disappointing. Felt like a guest writer coming in and cleaning up some loose ends with some of the fringe characters we've been able to avoid due to some of the high impact action in the core characters.

Twin Peaks was an episode that once again floated through a middle ground, but also somehow revealed a ton of information? It's always tough to say in that show, dude. Like we found out two characters are related to each other but are estranged. These two characters wouldn't even generally enjoy each others presence; how are they from the same family tree in any way? But I get it. Their intensities are the same volume but with different frequencies. Different powerful people. But did you see Sarah Palmer? Nah don't watch the show, huh? Well, yo. Her face is a passage to another dimension I think? Or maybe she just houses an entire dimension within her. It's tough to say. It's David Lynch, ya know? Weird. How are there only four more episodes?

Then another big bite into Game of Thrones. I tend to take those two shows back to back because they're so different. I almost need a break from that heavy weirdness, a lot of brainwork to something where, as popular and intertwined as it is, you don't have to pay any sort of attention at all to really enjoy it. It's all there for you. And maybe that's just a product of becoming so popular. I think that might actually be more the case. Where there may have been more cerebral elements of the show, the more popular it became, the less it spiked into more carnal events, and the more it felt like we were taking on big chunks of story over time. But again, going back to understanding that this show is quickly approaching its conclusion, maybe it's taking less time with its tapestry. Maybe we're just digesting these big ideas and watching them pull down curtains en route to a strong conclusion. The headiest part of the show for me is wondering how we're going to get a certainty here. Are we going to watch a frozen undead army battle the entirety of Westeros, but then also get a clear winner from the remaining two Queens? Do we ultimately have a game of League of Legends playing out in front of us, where the undead army is the little minions and the Champions involved are the Lannisters and the Snows and the Daenryses? Maybe. But I'm stoked that Tarly left the maesters. So good man! It was interesting to see something so relatable. This guy chased a dream for the longest time, and could have prospered, but he saw behind the veil! Rough. Anyone who has looked back behind the curtain into the positions of power and had to watch them make decisions from a higher position looking down without the knowledge that you gain from having your boots on the ground, hey, that's gonna burn you out, right?

Then after those two shows, it's easy to backslide into some more easy-entertainment. I watched Rick and Morty, which was an episode that was spoofing superhero tropes. Very clearly it was hitting on the Marvel Universe. For me, it was a little too self referential. The best way I can say it is that... it knows what it is now and I think it's playing a bit with what it can 'get away with' as being a show knowing it's a show and knowing it's got a multidimensional and multifaceted aspect to it. How close can you get to that singularity before you simply become Deadpool? There was a bit in there about the PA being confused because it was its first day that just worked for me as a perfect example for what the show was trying to be. Imperfect, I guess? Like... people stumbling over their words and not landing where they should. Not simply speaking their lines, but being more "conversational" about their sentences they're trying to say instead of delivering a line. But there were obvious jabs at things that were the things you would make obvious jabs about. I got it. I think the show has come from a place where they have so much finesse, usually, and this episode felt lazy. It felt poorly delivered. It's fine. I spoke to a bunch of friends too, right, and I was in the minority amongst them all. So I'm glad they watched it, they laughed, they enjoyed it. That's the point. Maybe I was just sort of hoping for more. Or, ya know, if this is a 12 episode season, this is the one that I'm not down with. The batting average for this show is still super strong. I'm just worried about their ability to feed the meme machine constantly, trying each episode to have a quote or a moment that's T-Shirt Ready.

Preacher was the last show I have to keep up with. It's just entertaining at this point, but I can't tell if I just like it so much because I love the graphic novel. This season was strongly elevating its game for 4 or 5 episodes but the last two have plateaued at best. Again, it's a long season. The guy playing a character named Herr Stark is super cool. But there's this whole other angle where a kid is in Hell, actually IN HELL and I want to continue watching that story play out.

The big meat of my day, though, the best part, was finally digging into the short films by Neill Blomkamp that he was putting up on Youtube. I knew he was putting stuff up on there and I had seen the teasers and trailers, etc. But I never actually think to jump on there and watch them. There are 3 "full" short films that are possibly better than 90% of anything I've watched this year. You like sci-fi right? They're all very clearly inspired by those great 80s/90s sci-fi powerhouses, like Alien, Predator, Event Horizon, The Thing, etc. But there are also elements of his newer stuff like Elysium and District 9 and also, 28 Days/Weeks Later, Apocalypse Now... it's just pulling from so many great reference points. They're like those stories I was writing a few months ago, microfictions, but obviously with such a stronger narrative. These are 20-25 minute films. Their production value is incredible. The sets are brilliantly made, the antagonists are the stars. There's this homunculus built from other humans, there's a rivergod who is a man transformed, and there are these aliens that are enslaving our entire planet... all of these things are done without handicap and without apology. They are brilliantly constructed. Totally recommend all of the stuff over on that YouTube channel. The coolest thing is he's said that his entire focus is to give it all away for free. And there was a poll on Twitter where he was asked if he should do a feature film or continue doing these little bite sized pieces. I think the choice was to do a feature, but I would really love it if they kept these context free moments going forever. They're genius. And they're all independent, so they're playing by their own rules. It's got so much potential from a storytelling perspective. This man's ideas are inspiring.

Also, Brand New is touring and coming through Charleston. Remember when I told you that bands never come through here? This is a big deal for me. Tickets go on sale on Friday. Fingers crossed that I can get something. I'm bugging out.

--
Answer #2. 
Ah, nothing man. Watched my shows. Listened to some tunes.
--

Because, really, the CORRECT answer is Answer #1.5, wherein Answer 1 is chopped into digestible parts and I end up having conversations that eventually juice all of the details of Answer 1 through the time I spend hanging out with these people. Answer #2 is really just a little short, but I don't give anyone the 'benefit of the doubt' of knowing what I'm talking about. So I don't talk about anything. My answer to the question "what books do you read" was incredibly long, but also approachable. Reference points. Names to check out. Roman numerals followed by capital letters and then digits. I never opened pull down menus unless they were asked about. It's tough, man. I notice here that so much of what I talk about is just flying by the heads of people who don't want to hear about it if they don't know about it. I can't tell what's up.

--

None of it matters, really.
Honest.
I just don't know how I was taught or how I learned to listen to what people talk about and be interested in what I don't know about to the point where I'm learning about more, etc. And how it seems that not many people learned to be that way.

See all the way through your house.

i was inspired by an article written by Tame Impala's Kevin Parker (here) about the process of enjoying the music that you love and to pay what you want for music you love. i didn't read the article before getting this spark of thought. so the article itself might just be a dissertation on the industry of the music business. 

what i'm going to talk about here is the process of sharing and enjoying what you love. whether it's an opinion about a song or a record or if it's the song or video itself, just love what you love. just get behind it. you can't find music that you're going to love from the most obvious of places all the time. sometimes you have to be that person that takes the risk and post a song that no one cares about just to get someone else's brain thinking. it's an important process of life. and the biggest thing to come to grips with is you might never understand or hear or witness the fact that you were the person that inspired that creative spark.

you're not always going to read a new novel and check the back and find a footnote that says, "this entire story and interaction between my main characters was inspired by Steve Cuocci, a guy i know on facebook from a show i went to once. Thank you for posting that HEALTH song that time and thank you for the brief comment you left above the video. It became my everything." a lot of times, catalysts are the furthest from the foreground, the things that come in this little subversive and pervasive ways, they enslave you in your dreams and they delay you in your walk to brew your tea or pour your coffee. they come to you in a doodle or you think you hear someone say a line from the song you thought you forgot on line at the post office.

share everything.

always feel good about the things that you want to share. you like it, you want it to represent you on social media at that moment, so put it out into the world. don't base whether or not it was a good idea on how many likes or comments or shares you get. don't share it for anyone but you. share it like a banner you're waving from your porch. 

FACT. i don't know how many people read this blog. i don't know if ANYONE reads this blog. i write poems and thoughts and dreams for myself here. sometimes i share things i'm proud of with the people i care about. sometimes i don't. i trust that at some point, someone will uncover this and read through some of it sometime. it's no big deal if no one does.

"the value of music is the value you extract from it"

listening to a record that i've heard no opinion on used to stress me out. it used to give me the feeling that i was walking down a pathway without any level of trust or any sense of direction. i've grown to understand that that very concept is what i've learned to love about music. sometimes i'll carry down the entire path and feel that a massive journey has been undergone. like i've crossed a desert or a tundra. i've recreated a whole new landscape of thought. and my virgin eyes and that path has been so clean that i feel that i've made my own impact on the place itself. other times i'll go through it without taking a single thing from it or feeling anything.

if it's something that i've received a recommendation from, so many different factors come into play. if they told me things to look for i might spend far too long in one position trying to translate their message into what's before my eyes or found in my ears. sometimes if someone has really torn something asunder, i'll be wondering and distracted why they found such a beautiful thing so terrible. ever worse, sometimes i'll take the time to agree with them on so many different things that they flagged for me that i won't explore the universes that sit behind them. or within them.

in the state of social media that we're in i think that we start to assign quality and value to our thoughts and ideas based on the amount of response that we get as opposed to the internal process that brought us there and the breakthrough that it took to arrive. i think we need to avoid allowing that value system to invade all of the things that we do. to a degree, we become addicted to that approval or that feedback. that's how so much of our output leaves our notebooks and our journals and our conversations and end up OUT THERE on the walls and in the big places for all the eyes to see. we want to be heard, and in those little micromoments, we want to be famous. we want to think that when someone likes our post, we have their attention and we're becoming that footnote in the novel.

you will never be the footnote in the novel.
even when you are.

you have to be the author.

i'm super caffeinated, man. so i'm running from thought to thought and i may not be making cohesive sense. but i'm not writing an essay for you. i'm capturing these thoughts to throw into the ocean in some kind of sealed bottle. i might tell people where to find the bottle and i might not. it just doesn't matter. assign the kind of love and the amount of love you feel only based on how you feel it. not how much you feel like you're allowed to or how much is appropriate to.

just be rad. have dope conversations. share your interests. share what you love. when you find someone with similar interests, don't compare just inspire. get behind it. your whole goddamn energy is going to disintegrate if you keep it in compartments and you dole it out in these regulated time frames.

a good goddamn, the ability of swarm.

it was weird. all the lights in the bar were on and I had arrived and all was warm and familiar. like old friends. I'd never met a one. but all old friends, like high school graduate mates. but a bit detached. like they knew,e, thought more OF me. more exactly, they knew a friend that I'd dated. and I came back to see her but she wasn't around or she was. but in this dream I never saw her. I remember walking in and they gave over control of the music and the atmosphere. and all the drinks were free. one of those absolutely temporary moments and one that feels so invincible. I sat on the bar and watched the full room and drank a beer endlessly. cold and constant. 

the specific part I remember is her friend coming over. a whole new invention. small and shorter. shoulders. a white tee shirt. she was sad and missing someone and I never understood who but I understood it. He had left her. and I never Loved her but she was under my protection there and then. and I had her back. and there was no romance save that reserved for the lost. I just wanted her to be okay. and she sat on the bar with me, quiet. large sunglasses and silent. 

and we left the bar and she drove us to a house somewhere unimpressive. white porch, unclean. and the sun was coming up on the light blue slats. paint peeling. and I remember sitting on the step. sun rise like a film waiting to be made, all the right reds and oranges with the blue. a goddamn deep sigh that goes forever because he's gone. and for some reason I don't have a shirt on and she has a neck tattoo and still wearing he sunglasses and the tears. the I'm sitting and she's crouching behind me, her arms crossed and leaning on my back and her head rested on her arms and crying. and I'm just there for support and we're okay. 

fastening the ship to the fleet.

i feel like i shy away from conversations that go from intro/beginner tier to intermediate/knowledgeable tier because the level of competitiveness in those conversations can be more overwhelming than the amount of shared information and helpfulness and reason that goes into them. at least in my experience. forget expert level. that's just where people to go masturbate or piss.

i guess this could be mostly pointed out on the internet, because where else can you really REGULARLY go to speak your mind on topics? the most ready example i have is a music group that just popped up on facebook that i got included in. there's so much that i want to speak about, but only one of them is a friend and the rest are friends of friends. so if i go in and start just wielding all of these opinions and throwing down general input on different artists, i'm already perceiving that i'm coming across as knowledgeable to a fault. that could just be my own nature of perception of others clouding my perception of how others perceive others. i think the syntax of that sentence holds up. what i'm trying to say is maybe it's just me.

same goes for anything hockey related or video game related. once i step outside of the realm of people who know and understand my voice i start to feel like i'll be seen as the person i was in middle school/high school which was a sort of forceful know-it-all who tried to prove that i knew a lot about subjects i knew nothing about through reference, posturing and "conversational logic equations". awful. so now i've learned about that part of my Self and have been very toned down about how i approach revealing my opinion outside of my groups of friends who know what i mean. but ALSO, i've been compensating for that part of my personality by being COMPLETELY nonpartisan in so many conversations that i actually do have a leaning towards. the one thing i've gained out of that style of conversation or interaction is that i leave all of the negative opinions out of it. it's never helped anyone. even now when i hear negative opinions about something it frustrates or embarrasses me for them. going back to the music discussion, there are times i wanna lay in and be like "that band is honestly more wack than i have ever heard. how are people listening to this and then bringing it with them?" but what's that going to do. are they going to change their opinion? a decade ago, fifteen years ago, yeah, i honestly think i thought people would rethink their stance. now, i more or less take a higher road where i want to ask "hey man, i don't think i get it. what song(s) or what other bands are you listening to that got you into that? i think i need a stepping stone." same thing happens with sports, but the nature of the conversation is always competition so i'm always instantly disappointed when someone brings competition into it because obviously i'm the outsider there. it's fine.

i would love to 'escalate' my interactions on these types of subjects that i actually have a knowledge about. not only to learn more on the subjects but just to get proven wrong a little bit. learn that a few people might talk some cool shit and be willing to hear me out and learn something. i know i have a lot to offer and with my current surroundings and current job, i don't think i'm teaching anybody anything, which is something i've always sort of gotten a big rush from.

you gotta feel good, man.