i have sliced my thumb, down the middle, and almost halfway through the length of the nail.

it did not hurt, at the instant that it happened, but there was a jolt and i crumpled to the floor and clutched the thumb with my good, right hand. and then the blood started to ooze out between my fingers and it dripped all over the floor.

it happens in real life, sometimes.

i somewhat calmly negotiated with the first aid kit and wrestled out some antibiotic ointment and bandages, and i went and washed the thumb clean and i dabbed it, and i put superglue on the split nail, and i wrapped it, and i am afraid to look.

if i did not have a thumbbone to stop my dumb, stupidly wielded pocketknife, then surely i would be missing quite a chunk of flesh.

you always cut away from yourself, numbnuts.

and now is the throbbing pain, several hours after.

tim is not handy with tools. that’s just the way it is.

i thought i would share my pathetique with all, and so.

and so i am sorry to my thumb and to everyone. i am hopeless, charlie brown.

oh dear.

dad has constructed a windshield for his snowblower.

what a geek.

wait!

here he is giving us a “thumbs up” from behind his protective snowblower windshield.

that’s where i get it from.

i guess that mom didn’t tell him that putting on a hat and scarf would accomplish the same objectives, with substantially less effort ?

Novae, Novae, my inner friend.

Six was probably too young to prophesy disaster, and have a coldest sense of impending death, to points that keep you awake and in fear, even many decades too early.

My iceberg was 90% above water and pulled sunken ships from the ocean floor.

It was not gravity. I do not know what it was.

Conversely, my eyes have always looked sunk.

Sometimes I have made honest efforts at being out loud, but never worked out. Still, after all. A lot of times, how time goes by a lot. How often where my playtime ended in honest mistakes. There is less to take comfort in, when I’d like to.

Once, how April took June and then they both disappeared. I have always been year-round and relentless. Every time I wake up I am still here with me. Sometimes tried to run very fast, very away, never worked either, but then when I was exhausted, I found myself not minding. Appreciating the company. I was never very good at courage or confidence, anyways, I say to myself, in his curled-up-under-a-blanket stance against the onset of ignorant society and expectation.

My tired orbit is a losing of form. Even gravity loses its ambition, eventually.

The doom of lacks. A punchline, when we are too old to regret much of anything. Sunked. A faraway time, set aside for extinguishment of all those embers of the burning child inside.

I am or I will decide to be a definition, to be determined.

Ever uncradled,
-tmm.

I am in Philadelphia, where my brother lives now a days.

I am not here to see my brother, I am here to work the twighlight at the industrial-ghetto cogeneration plant. I am once again an important person who will say “No, put that over there” or “I don’t want you taking those readings with a taper gauge” or something likewise.

The skyscrapers are in plain sight.

A lot of times it is sleeting, or raining. This morning at 4:30AM i remembered to start my car to let it warm up for ten minutes.

But my brother, he’s very incidentally turning thirty on Sunday. He has the same birthday as the anniversary of some old British queen getting her head chopped off. He thought that was rad, when we were kids, and looking at some book that told you what happened on your birthday. For my birthday, it said something about milk deliveries. I can’t remember what, exactly. Maybe it was when milk deliveries started. Though it’s strange to think that milkmen around the world got the urge all at the same time.

Anyway, my brother is turning thirty, and he didn’t seem as depressed as I felt he should have been when I saw him last weekend, but maybe he doesn’t feel it’s anything to be depressed about. I guess I would be depressed, because when I was little, all I thought about age-wise, was that in the year 2000, I would be twenty-three. “Wow, twenty-three. I will be science fiction, by then..”, and anyway, I really didn’t tend to take into consideration any time or aging After the year 2000. Twenty-three and 2000 were unbelievable, anything more was just being ridiculous.

But here we are. Well passed all that. I turned twenty-seven. Back when I worked in the picture store and I made frames all day long, there was this one poster (that no one ever bought) that was called “Forever 27″ and it had Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison all hanging out in this temple of heaven or something, and it was kind of like a Dali picture because it had a molten clock and all that.

I don’t plan on dying this year, but who knows. I used to think that being a young genius and rising like the Phoenix and holding the world in awe and then completely vanishing in the midst of it all would be a pretty good idea. Hot damn, I probably still do. But then I didn’t turn out to be all that awe-inspiring, which is kind of depressing, but I guess it means I can have grandkids someday, and give them littlekid pushes on the swings.

If I walk into my apartment sometime in the next year, and I find that my clocks have melted all over the place, and made a mess of the walls and carpet, then I might tend to take that as an ominous sign. Except I don’t think I have any Real clocks, just digital ones.. and the microwave. Oh, the microwave…

Didn’t someone paint a melting digital clock, once? Ha, that’s pretty funny.

Everybody knows digital clocks don’t melt.

I work from 5PM til 5AM, and I sleep from 5:30AM til noon or so, but on Sunday I’ll get up early and go downtown to meet my family, who are coming down to surprise my brother when he turns thirty. We are going to a brewpub called “Nodding Head” and their pale ales are delicious.

Of course, on Sunday I could also be lifting a rotor at work, which is a very stressful thing when you’re in charge, mostly because it is 30-tons heavy and 40-feet long, and you’re trying to maneuver the thing through nasty natural gas pipelines and buildings and people and hazards, and it has delicate expensive pieces within a sixteenth-inch from other delicate expensive pieces, and if anything goes wrong, then I pack my shit into my bag, get my coat, get in my car and go home.

Overall, it’s been okay though. This is like a retreat, sometimes. A breaking of routines, because routines get evil, after awhile. Routines are easy to get into when you’re at home all the time, and routines are easy to disappear when you change your geography. It’s a time for hush sounds and gray cloud sights, puddles of water in the asphalt and writing down nonsense in books and in livejournals, and eating popcorn and popping medicine, and coughing and putting jergens on overdry skin.

By the way, jergens, more than any other skin lotion, when I smell it, it makes me think of a certain moment. It’s a weird phenomenon, very immediate – smell the jergens, and all of a sudden I have visions of my college dorm room, Fish A to be exact, and Camel’s “Snow Goose” is playing on my cheap collegeboy stereo. It is very vivid. I don’t know how a thing like lotion gets so tied together with a moment. Smells are funny like that, I guess.

Anyway, it would be dumb to write anything more. I hate to be a bother. Most of the time, I am trying to leave everyone alone.

Now, I think that I will drink a glass of milk, and I’ll practice at being a a lousy folksinger, and ëa will meditate all around me in a haunting twighlight.

Thank you. Your friend,
-Tim.