your north star thang.

of course i've regretted starting this subject because now i'll have to finish it. and playing with emotions and other people is like playing with the occult, and can snap everyone's neck with one bad intention that resonates wider than you thought possible.

i've tried to help a couple of girls on the toilet seat by the side, and each time i feel like i did when i tried to save the stray cat but it ran in traffic to get away from me and got smeared by a car in front of my very 9 or 10 year old eyes.

i coached one girl open up a chilly cold cool man and like most chilly people who crack open in love, he fell into it with whole body and gave up everything for her: his career, his country, his culture, his friends.

but she got bored and like many bored pretty people, she looked outside herself, and soon considered cheating on him behind his back.

(this is why i try to avoid pretty people. it's too easy for them to move on. i try to live like i have a flayed meat face. i try to bring the right ones in and keep 'em like no one else will have me.)

anyhow, about the girl i helped.

i felt sick sick sick.

i felt like i'd helped the wrong person and i'd helped yet another girl cut the fins off a shark and toss him back in the water to die.

HE was the kitty cat i'd chased into the road this time.

why?

because i'd just helped them get farther than they may have stumbling along in the more modern blunt "cat-and-mouse" game of love, or what high-fructcose corn syrup crap that's passing for "love" today.

i'd actually made things worse in the world because i'd just helped lock in cynicism, pain, and distrust by prematurely breaking people open who were not aware of what they had in each other and how to honor it.

what more can you possibly give a woman like that, when you've already given her everything you've got? nothing. you will run for an eternity to keep her from looking beyond you for insatiable need for elusive "happiness."

love?

you've got to be fucking kidding me.

opening up people to control or crush them is like smashing newborn kittens with baseball bats to me.

so i try to temper this bluster, "i'll save you!" ridiculous cartoony leo thing a lot of us seem to have in caricature because it's all about us.

i wonder, "do i write this to brag about my exploits and all i know?"

and i smile because i know that i'm wrong and know NOTHING.

all i know is that i see and feel so much pain and fear--fucking TERROR--out there at just being simply alive in oneself. and this is my expertise. being the lone asshole. and i've made it far enough to say it's pretty fucking amazing here.

there are no discounted admissions or comps. you've gotta live every piece of this yourself, and it is actually harder for me to want to share this stuff. to put dark lines around it with words, because then it will no longer be mine.

it will belong to everyone.

and in my history, people laugh at me until they look around the room to see how everyone else is reacting. it's sooo hard to live with the need for a fucking INTERPRETER. someone to be the liason between myself and others.

we are so the same and when i look into anyone's eyes hard enough, i know we're the same.

so i take a deep breath and go...

i go because even if this is just for nikkiana, i don't want such a beatiful, full-of-heart woman to suffer needlessly or think she's ever "too much."

i've seen too many of us amazing souls just keep treating ourselves like shit long after our captors are dead. we're cheating the little ones. it's murder out there and i'm inspired to return to basics.

i know i'm rambling. but fuck it. no one's paying me shit.
you sift through the salvation army bags and see if you find cashmere.

north star...

i don't know where to start because even as i want to write what i know, i know i don't know it.

like money.

let's start with money because we have to end up there, anyhow.

i have almost archaic beliefs that border on fantasy even to ME.

but i feel like i am actually comprised of many "people" inside me, and i must honor each of their conflicting arguments even if i can't explain or back them up.

so one of my archaic beliefs is that if i risk making a promise, i must twist myself in all possible contortions to keep it... until doing so enervates me in a bad way.

(losing energy can also be depression or anger turned inwards, i think. not feeling yourself, being in touch with yourself and trying to grit your teeth to "get along" in some bigger mass reality can really exhaust you. you're sleep walking. what do you expect?)

anyhow, my other archaic belief is that is that it's LOVE or MONEY.

you can't live well for both.

and money is all that society defines as success and power.
so if we return to the beans and shells standard, then that's the same thing.

but the two--love/money-- must overlap in the real world and so how do you check yourself?

fuck that. go back even further!---how do you even CHOOSE?

i can't answer that for you. i don't know what you feel you're here to find out. that's up to you.
but i am only for those who are here for love, art, truth ("and the american way"--i know, i can hear it and want to flush my own face down the toilet but this shit is actually HOT and adventurous to me).

but money is a very real and necessary thing in this world, even as a good lover. you need time for those long 4-day fucks and mooning endlessly out the window. even if you live in a cheap rent-controlled rent apartment, that's wealth, too.

free time IS wealth now.

and i don't think it should be bizarre to have free fucking time anymore.

anyhow, money.

some women are way more realistic than me and go for the cash. maybe they're more fragile? never thought about it that way. whether she actually is or not, joan rivers personifies that kind of woman in how she married someone she didn't really love for more pragmatic reasons. and she's got a hard working blue collar approach to work that gets a ton of respect.

but there's a young, childlike desperation and restlessness and need and hovering quality to her femininity. part of her surgery and quest for beauty that mocks US in its LOOK AT ME AM I BEAUTIFUL ENOUGH NOW? that is art and how she recreates herself and she's performance art writ large.

a shame that because she's a woman and in comedy, it's up to us few women to get that part and add facets to her story that you have to see with a dog whistle if you're paying attention for a change. but we women are like black people and white people will have a fucking louis louis parade for warren zevon, a guy who wrote what---one song people play every halloween ("werewolf in london")---and when rick james died it was a fucking foot note on the news like "see?"

i digress.

anyhow, i would've rather married for LOVE and avoided the fucking suicide or had love passion and THEN the husband's suicide. but to be pragmatic and get the side of suicide anyhow? no thank you.

so i'm gonna speak on my struggle to never be controlled by any desire and if i couldn't have what i desired, then i'd figure i ought to look into this "desire," and see if i couldn't "re-route" the pathway somehow.

i have put a lot of work into myself and don't want to break down because i've been sandbagged and hogtied by some fucking "desire" that'll barge in, drink all the beer and leave mud all over the house. i binge to see the essence of many things, but i force myself to quit before it's too much of a problem if i love it enough.

i'm about love, truth, and art. they're one in the same to me.

but if you're about love, it means that you might as well resign yourself to the fact that to new outsiders, you'll always end up looking like the maniacally smiling free love stoner girls swaying wildly at a grateful dead concert.

to insiders, you'll look like a stubborn unrealistic masochist with your head up your ass.

it may seem that since i'm about love, i'd have contempt for those who're in it for the money.

nah.

i think they're realists making the best of an impossible situation to ever figure out: life.

and i sometimes envy them for their apparent ease at pointing at a goal that never changes, modulates, or goes anywhere else.

at least that's MY fantasy. i know otherwise.

anyhow, so i speak only to you who're in this for the love.
and the rest? i have to try and put the antidote, the reversal, in at the same time.

i have to be responsible.

more later.

this is hard to think.
but i have a lot coming up so i'll be busy and unable to write much.

so i'll have more time to THINK clearly.

but in the meantime, think on your north star, your lines.

you have to think of your code, your rules. have fun with it.
what do you want and how to go for it?

every day i try to do one more tiny scary, embarrassing thing so that i don't stay too much alone in my head.

i can't explain any of this or why i do any of this.

this is my life and i've always been living my art.
i'm never alone.
i have a zillion of old spirits and souls before me who make me toss my head back and laugh at how seriously i take myself and everything.

these are timeless concerns that no one has ever found the solution for.

there is no solution.

even when you think you've figured something out---psych!

i suppose that's what makes life so fascinating.

so i know nothing.
this will all just be a lot of bullshit chatter here, to add to all the other bullshit chatter out there.

i only hope to alleviate some precious person's needless suffering so that she or he will swagger out as their humble selves and do their job.

i think i believe that our deeds are like the lights of long-dead stars. their light still travels for millions of years.

how amazing is that?

and just like my determining factor about whether an idea or design is good, i lay that concept over what if it's not true? and striving to pass on kindness is still preferable to living without giving a fuck.

so looking at it that way, i'm a hedonist.
i prefer you look at me that way.
you will doubt me and do your own thing.

i know nothing.

i am only struggling like you are.

x