This is me

From Wikipedia...

"The Tetris effect is the ability of any activity to which people devote sufficient time and attention to begin to dominate their thoughts, mental images, and dreams. It is named after the game of Tetris, which requires the player to rotate and move falling blocks of different shapes (see tetromino) to create, and thereby eliminate, complete horizontal lines of blocks.

People who play Tetris for a long stretch of time may be subsequently involuntarily prompted to think about ways different shapes in the real world can fit together, such as the boxes on a supermarket shelf or one's home furniture. They may also see images of falling tetrominos at the edges of their visual field or when they close their eyes. They may also dream about falling Tetris shapes when drifting off to sleep..."

Characters

Today's hunter-gatherer type: A large man in sunglasses fumbling out of a silver Ferrari. He's wearing a dress shirt tucked into belted slacks that choke him in the middle. Puffy blue lips. A goatee the color of dried milk along a sunburnt slope of a no-chin. He moves as one who fears stopping means death, throwing his legs in front of himself almost violently. Minutes later he emerges from the coffee shop, stuffs himself back into the rocket and and whines away in low gear, drink in hand like a sacred amulet...

Crazy days

Been having a lot of insane thoughts lately. The holidays bring too much mental garbage.

One involves money and how I can make more of it. I'm getting on in years, you know. A want a house -- again. And I want money to retire with. Actual savings.

I have two problems with this desire, however. The main one is my belief that money is rotten. It's just a really rotten thing. Yeah, it motivates people, but rarely does it seem to motivate for good. We'd all be better off without it ... except I can't fathom how any of us would get off our asses.

The other problem is that I've made decent bread before, but it came at a mental price.

Writing stories that people paid me for took a lot of energy away from what I thought of as real writing, which is the stuff I loved as a kid, writing that comes out of your heart and guts. Being money-minded, however, punched all kinds of holes in the part of me that wanted to create. It made me sad and depressed.

So I don't know. Money and I make terrible dance partners. I get a lot of it and start taking it for granted. I don't have any and I feel pissed and trapped. I don't even like thinking about it.

And yet here I am, thinking about it.

I'm thinking of making money apart from my current "business" of writing. Things I wouldn't seriously think of doing before. But things that, maybe, I might be good enough at to actually enjoy and possibly "give back" in ways I couldn't before.

Ideas are coming to me that don't seem forced. I'm in an extremely motivated mood.

An empty canoe sits by a stream...

Poem

Spikes drill my head
lungs chocked with goo
no shittin', just pissin'
Motherfuckin' flu

Tiptoes

I have to be very careful here.

Sometimes I'm happy. Not always proud of the choices I made, but rather the fruits of them. I've done better than I thought I would.

And sometimes I want to throw it all away.

I have to be careful, because I'm prone to taking my current emotions and misplacing them for the truth or my general state. Emotions come and go.

But sometimes I think I myself am misplaced. That I listened to to other people's desires and feelings before my own. That I've been bamboozled, trapped. Sucked dry. And I've let it happen because, in many ways, it was easy. Petty needs were met. But not the real ones.

On days like this -- and today is one -- I don 't wonder "what if." I wonder "why not?" As in, why not hang it up? Take off?

There are lots of why nots. The feeling never lasts.

Still, it's a dangerous place to be...