ohhh Mother Goose, she’ is on the skids.

She is dizzy from the withdrawal and she is drinking a bottle down.

From the time she puts her thumb to that cratered eye.

Exiles begin their bloodflight to a bottomed table-leg frown.

The whiskey-asker, the sharp-dizzies, the neutral-renown

Of slowing the astronomical try.

(i am surface, for the tired falling orbits of paper crowns)

(lack of generator experience causes tim to be moved from nightshift lead to dayshift floor – scene XI)

[11 o'clock PM. harsh fluorescent lighting.]

tim: “okay, i think i’m going to take off. you got everything under control?”

jiang: “ohhh… i am being VERY worried, that you wir be going, but i fhink it wir be arright..”

tim: [recognition of sarcasm]

tim: “……..oh-kee-doke… bye.”

tim: [self-recognition of pangs of hurtfeelings. begins diverting all-available white blood cells to emotive cuts and lesions.]

[
stage direction:
tim exits the work trailer and immediately pulls the collar of his coat up. he is weighed down with a backpack on one shoulder, and a laptop bag on the other. snowflakes flurry against the light of the philadelphia skyline. a harsh wind blows into his face and grows a tear into the corner of his left eye. camera zooms out while he walks. cue "soothe" by smashing pumpkins.
]

this morning is drizzly and dreary. mornings like this are necessities, for keeping up with equilibrium. equilibrium is a team effort.

this past weekend, my younger brother visited. he just turned twenty-five. we went out to a lot of places and took a sip, and had bites to eat. he brought his bicycle and we rode downtown, and to belle isle. he kept stopping to read the signs about the dead yankees and hydro-turbines and canal construction. so i had to circle a lot.

we went to the science museum fountains, which are just marble replicas of the earth and moon that float on highpressure jets of water so that they can turn and rotate and revolve.

we tried to change the earth’s rotation, but it was difficult. maybe there is too much consequence involved. or maybe because it’s manytons in weight.

it was easy to spin the moon, though.

“spin, spin, spin the moon! it’s your time to spin the moon!….
spin spin spinaaaaeeaaaeeaa…..”

umm. inside joke to you, drilled into head for me.

he also brought his playstation games, but i’m not up for those lately.

i think he had fun.

for some reason, i’m much more myself around this brother than anyone else in the family. maybe i feel like i don’t have to conscribe to a certain set of personality traits with him. i don’t know why. i have weird and undisclosed psychologies.

here is a picture with me and siblings. it was taken a few years ago, i guess.

i have since lost the pac-man tuque, but i vow that i will claim it once again, and i shall hold it aloft, even on level with the eyes of God, and all shall incant: “Behold!”.

and then i shall put it on my head and push its ancient elasticity to the limits, and attempt to even keep my ears warm with it.

lately, i’m worried about my inconsistent, and sometimes somewhat random decisions about when and when-not to start a new paragraph. also, i’m worried that i am becoming less literate and having even less substance, and i am worried about the inevitability of death and of horrible accidents to myself and loved ones and to living out a life vacant of meaning. but for right now, it’s just the thing about the paragraphs, and when to start new ones.

i mean, i should’ve learned that in the second grade.

This Just In: after many years of loyal duties, the bulb in my beautiful halogen light stand has coughed, sputtered, and taken its artificial light to heaven. a moment, if you will…

also concerning my brother’s visit, he found out that i have an online journal, which means it is only a matter of time before the rest of the family finds out.

i liked anonymity so much better. i guess that all online journals are doomed to be found out by friends and families, or you end up making friends through it, but eventually you end up with an audience which is close and which has consequences. and the journal suffers because you are writing with those consequences choking the intakes on your subconscious.

it’s a life-cycle, and i’ll take it as seriously as i want to.

maybe that means the days here are numbered. and maybe that needs to happen anyway. maybe i can continue to write about inane things. some people would say that’s what i’m doing already. to them i would say: haha!fuckoff.

on the trees, there are small buds, and i think we all know that means there are leaves waiting to happen.

i sang in a band last night. there’s a first time for everything.

it was fun, and we rocked.

maybe someday we will share.

-

my lil’bro might visit this weekend. if he does, it would be the first time since like 2001 that anyone has come to visit me.

i mean, jupiter has turned into a giant fetus since then.

entire nations have been created and have collapsed.

and no one has come to visit the tim.

maybe nobody likes me.

-

the new decemberists ep is a brillianbt.

that sentence was convoluted, but i’d like to leave it as is.

-

this afternoon i am driving to south carolina. i won’t be there very long. it will be alright.

-

raphael was my favorite ninja turtle.

you should have seen him in #19-#21, the “return to new york” series. a pungent lost soul.

that was before they made it cartoonish for kids. when there was still blood’n'gore and true repurcussions.

oh, the literature!

-

someday when i am surging forth.

-

oh well, damsel in distress…

it’s been too long since i’ve bitched about my job.

i’m gonna do it again.

i looked on monster the other night. nothing in richmond for a dude with my spacious skillset. there is still far fields aplenty in places like orlando, greenville, houston, and then a kind of intriguing location of waitsfield, vermont. extremely rural, halfway between burlington and montpelier.

i like burlington. i’ve always, or sometimes, fantasized about living there again. it’s majestic and tiny, and slopes straight out of lake champlain. i remember riding the ferry across from new york for the first time, and i felt like an explorer. but that was also the first time that i was far beyond any leashes or ropes i’d had up until then. i lived in the back of a strange family’s house, and they were psychotic, but i played soccer with the little boy sometimes, and my first night there i could hear lynrd skynrd playing a concert a few miles away at the county fairgrounds, and the second night there was a thunderstorm more violent than any i’d ever seen, and i made a friend of my own, by my own devices, and his name was ben and i don’t talk to him anymore. ben was a great guy though. he worked for GE for awhile, then he quit and moved to burlington because he loved it too.

i would go to parties at ben’s place and i finally got used to being ignored. it takes awhile. it was great, though. i’m not being sarcastic.

i was nearly an alcoholic though. i never drank alcohol before vermont. after vermont, i was drinking like three beers every week-night. abusing my hannaford’s privileges. gained lots of weight. i lost my stickboy figure, for the first time, in vermont.

and i’d cruise in my white ford tempo and listen to the same thirty cassettes over and over and over again. but i was listening to a whole lot of bjork and low and my bloody valentine and (?)marilyn manson back then. and i would write dumb rhymes into sprialbound notebooks and lose touch with everyone i’d known, except for mom. she’d call every once in awhile, and my phone number started with 802, but i don’t remember the rest of it, and we didn’t have cell phones back then.

and manda would drive up from rhode island and we’d go to montreal and see wendey, or i would go up to montreal and see wendey and pascal, and we would go see godspeedyoublackemperor in their own loft, rocking out to post-apocalyptic moyas, and i would sit right next to the film projector which would be putting a thousand spliced images of the word “hope” and it was all scrawled and scratched out and we could’ve swore the world was ending at any moment, but then the godspeed kitty-cat strolled right next to me and i petted it for awhile and the cat said the world is not so divisive and snarly, people are too unorganized to carry out conspiracies on such a grand scale, don’t worry so much, you twentyoneyearold emo tragedy. and nobody knew what “emo” meant, back then, because i asked around, and everyone was shrugging.

i liked the cat. he was godspeedyoublackemperor’s cat, but he was so down-to-earth.

but, saying all of that, i don’t want to leave richmond. not for the sake of employment, anyway.

you always get a certain feeling when you come back to richmond, where you live. the neighborhoods are quaint and there are trees and architecture and a river, and it almost feels like it owes me something. i don’t know why richmond would owe me a damn thing, but that’s what it feels like, sometimes. like there is an unfulfilled promise living here, and i just haven’t found it yet.

and so in the car, on the way here, i began to wonder why i was bitching about my job so much. i have to leave a lot, i have to be away a lot, but i’m living comfortably. i’m not destitute anymore. sure, i don’t feel like i’m “living” sometimes, having no epiphanies and taking part in society, but then i wouldn’t if i had no other obligations, either. i am a loser, and i’m making a lot of it, under the circumstances. it’s not that bad.

long may i run.

i can afford to sacrifice a few months here, so that i can “really live” in a few months over there. maybe that’s what i should shoot for.

it should take awhile, besides. if you find all of the epiphanies before you’re thirty-five, then what to do with the rest of your time?

i dunno.

i came back home at two-thirty in the morning, and everything was peacefulpeaceful quiet, and there was dew on all the windows, and i was so glad to have humidity again, to ease my cracked and cratered skin, and it was Warm. Warmth, the goddess of soft touches.

i slept in my own bed, with my own blankets. they were absent of the webs of static electricity that i’d gotten used to over the last month. it was bliss. i slept until three in the afternoone. that ended with an ‘e’ inadvertently, but i’m leaving it that way.

i feel like i should phase out for awhile. just dig it.

things ain’t so bad, dude. lots of things are irrevocable, but nothing’s hopeless.

oh me oh my.

DEAR EXTRA LEAP YEAR DAY,

YOU WERE BORING.

IN 2008, KEEP IT TO YOURSELF.

- TIM.