13.

all travelling away and home again.

xxx

"being together solves most of it for as long as those things stay solved. in the history or women and man, it's different for each -- for me, it's splendid enough to remember past the memories of pain and defeat and unhappiness; when you take it away, do it slowly and easily. make it as if i were dying in my sleep instead of in my life, amen." - cb

12.

no longer some alien place. just landed and home and calmly and safely folded into what was put on hold. what was and will continue to be. and for three days, my legs ache. i try to readjust to east coast time, and sleep pattern and the constant caged and forced interactions we're prodded into within the retail universe. it drains. you feel an open mind start to close up like a freezing flower bud. it hurts and recedes like an eye exposed to a light shined too bright and too fast. interactions with peers don't make sense. with loved ones feels strained. i want to laugh harder or be entertained easier or be held by something or someone. i almos had the wicked urge to listen to a full rush of paul simon. something flat and positive, but an easy high. a full draw. a forGODDAMNEDsure type of thing. i want to be able to be affected and unaffected on purpose.

eleventh album: volcano choir's repave.

i can only imagine this to be compared to hospital bed boredom. i look at pictures of multiple old friends and can only see that their skins are laid taut and violently tight against their skulls and know i can feel their bones underneath my thumbs and in my palms. or something like this. it even happens with celebrities.

11.

delivery and understanding all seem sheltered. everything seems nicer now, though. since he retired, since he cut back on drinking. maybe i understand him more as a member of the ever moving machine and not an obstacle or a gate or a punishment. i feel like we all get to go through this. or at least i hope we do. i feel pretty lucky that my parents didn't divorce and force us to figure it out. i think at times they probably had to fake it the way we had all had to do. i'm thankful for the togetherness we've found in the years after everyone's reacting to having kids and being born and being kids and raising kids and being teenagers and raising teenagers and then growing up together and figuring it all out together. living and coexisting. the car ride ends up not being awkward at all. comfortable and calm and smoothed out. a rare time that the connection feels conversational and there are no seats to hold or fill or act within. if there's one thing that's easier than all the rest that i know i can do within my means and my power, it's to have a better, stronger more legitimate relationship with my father. i think we might all need to get there. so i'm home and i think this is where the travel journal ends. 

tenth album: orion.'s the sound and the fury ep.

10.

which ruled. it had a solid vibe to it, good beer selection, awesome food and a fantastic staff. i felt a little disappointed that i didn't end up on the strip or in any number of random encounters. i set the bar high on the first two trips. and i think my issue is that there IS a bar and there there IS an expectation. the concept needs to be escaped. i felt good this year, like i actually gained friends out of all of it. that i found a solid middle ground where it won't feel a stretch to talk work with them at any point. and also about life and its chaos. to pull something personal out of them. to not be a unit that simply represents another unit. and all of this was done without team building exercises and without quarantine and playing little games with workbooks. it was just simple time spent together, both confirming and disspelling that we were all the exact charicatures that we all witnessed each other be from a distance. i spent time solo w/ people i don't often spend time with at all. everything felt alright. closer to home now, on a descent path with turbulence and atmosphere shifts. getting picked up by my father in what has always been the same kind of silent car ride with sort of misunderstood conversation patching up little in betweens. i get the idea that he never lived much as a young adult. but maybe he did. this could be me assuming, still adolescently, "he just doesn't get it." his conversation and

09.

at times will require complacency. so. we can hope as far as we'd like. and i'd like for things to sort of sail. i'm sort of blessed [and cursed] w/ an observant and accepting demeanor to last through different cricks and adjustments in plans and streams as long as there's an equally fast and/or sure alternate stream. but things seem directed at least. i'll take that. nothing feels difficult. flying over cleveland now. home in an hour. something like that. the best way to describe what vegas really ended up being is almost a perfect example and framing of how a morale and direct battle cry can be so well crafted and have an almost perfect pitch and sense of spontaneity to be genuine get taken an incredibly different and deaf way when the too populous and too many expect not only the people in charge to get it right, but also to do the rest of the work for them. retail becomes a condition of them. you're so used to a company getting it wrong that by the time they get it to the point where you sense it to be right, you're waiting for the reveal that they're about to change it in the very same breath in which they've solved it. but outside of that, the unity and unification that the conference brought for our team of 12 was pretty massive, and adds a sense of confidence in and of itself. so it yielded at least that result. travel journal stuff: we stayed at the palazzo. bedrooms were gorgeous as was the hotel. but the casino portion of it was incredibly stale. the connected tower, the venetian seemed to have a "cheaper" price range, but that allowed for more human company, all completely wild and flawed and numerous. we ate at grand lux cafe twice which was excellent, high priced (to scale) and accessible. we also ate a place called simply i <3 burgers 

08.

if life turns into waiting foreer. and now people are talking about and quoting south park behind me.

eighth album: hrvrd's from the bird's cage

ninth album: portugal. the man's in the mountain in the cloud.

and it's four days later. sleep infested and dispersed some of the more random and clouded and feral thoughts. it's disappearing in a way, but loss less. i'm clear now. sort of a clear vision of what's ahead for life and for the workplace. and for interpersonal relationships in many different facets. how do we build these sorts of interactions with plans, though? there are equal measures and chaos and entropy that occur in the lives of others, equal other and opposite plans and perception in the heads of others. we can't break their trajectory in clean, solid swipes and jabs. instead, we breed our two different life paths and through resistance or cooperation spawn a brand new timeline, universe, income, outcome and end result. a vision can only remain so cautiously desperate. it demands a certain leash and an understanding that solitude can only exist as singularly as it is independent of other stimuli. force would have to be applied at some juncture in the future of any vision that involves cooperation or interjection from another vision. currents can only smoothly go unhalted for so long. compliance

07.

book was okay. not gweat. but an interesting one off read. beauty and the beast sort of motif w/ a little bit of commentary on the fashion of the 80s. of today. of forever. what i did take more note of though was the intro and ode that moore wrote to the initial director of the project, malcolm mclaren. talked him up something magical. definitely want to look into him. as well as the deaths of alexander mcqueen and gianni versace. the types of things that involve and include fashion and the stress of it. the real beauty of it; the bloody fingers. i don't [always, necessarily] want to SEE the pieces. just the inspiration and concept and work involved in it. i had a brief peek into it. peek? sat here for about, what, twenty, thirty minutes before i decided to suck the peacock's dick and show my colors a little bit. surprise (said the narcissist <fuck>), no one said anything and life didn't change. so while sitting in a turbulant flight from phoenix to vegas, a couple things happen. one, i'm sat next to a couple who actually speaks to each other. happily. and that rules. and also, i fall asleep for under the time it takes to finish a song and during that brief, briefest sleep, i dream that silas from weeds is banging my nonexistent mother... which then transitions calmly and serenely into two boots floating in a stream of water and someone begins to slip their feet into each boot while reciting life lessons that i never hear because i wake up from the feeling of my eyes rapidly moving as if in a seizure. whether that actually happens or not is a complete mystery to me entirely. maybe some read body shit went down. maybe not. but we're landing in vegas now, so we'll see if the lines are tolerable.