Nihil curo de ista tua stulta superstitione.

it is a terror to be tethered to such an uncaring world

to be the couch of its obese laziness

to hear day in and day out the cries of the mad declaring their god living

and to know and live and feel

to be hurled into a universe

by cacklers who speak from proctotongues

how does life find the ability to rake the heart with

the intense malice of babies eating dinner

or pray for us poor higgs-boson particles

millions smashed into excited existence to be smeared on

million dollar walls

we are the ocean before the waterfall

individually molecules

beware the rocks below

beware the rocks above because they cradle you towards doom

beware gravity

because he's always bringing you down

and I can't find the way up

strings playing the mockery of my struggle

the discordant snap of my bow

when shooting for the stars you can never hit

except occasionally yourself and the others below

I don't want to pull my head out of the clouds

to put my feet on the ground

when I look down I see nothing but the toils of hell

and the trials of eternal scarcity

the part time full time entry level

join our murdered elephant generating system

but I can't walk

no I can't walk

I can't walk

with you

without you I don't know what held me together so long

my imaginary friends and imaginary control

of a world so thermally chaotic

I know the rules I know the rules

boxes make me sick

sickness makes me sick

where can a soul go as lost as mine

a will-o-the-wisp

weakly unbecoming and bemused

and where am I now

where am I now

I don't know where I am now

I don't know where future me went

because I loved him

and I wanted to be him

and he had everything

popsicles in the sun held out better than he

and a box of them more than an hour's labor

the whole story of my life more red pen than black

more stones

the character playing me keeps saying more stones

but all I want is to confess

my integrity too much a burden

where can I go

where will it go

keep it simple

rewrite the whole damn poem and have it say

too much

someways I feel trapped by our love
walls inexplicably planted by unmentionable time
time summer moon spring sun winter clouds
sometimes staying is evening and leaving is morning
the promises of cities blacken and enlighten
light hallway bulbs tv shows nightstand lamps
somedays leaving is calling and staying is mourning
pressure catatonia paranoia months and months and
(months and months and months and years
and) number taking score keeping rule setting
avoiding the voice because the voice seeks to call
circumspect maneuvers acrobatic in nature
descriptive of the nature of bitter conversation
the hawk the field mouse blaming each
for conduct unsporting (dark corners daring
) somewalks break spirits without sweats
days make nifty cells, nights make blatant well
breakfast loves and unsporting suns
each day harder and harder to break
plant hammer summer sing drummer runner
somemorns come fast and some breaks come hard
walls inexplicably
someways I feel

-Thomas Hardy Mann III

As soon as I felt sure to reinvigorate my blogging, a wonderful and terrible event happened. I got my apartment. I love the place. Six hundred square feet of instant pleasure. The only problem is that I have yet to procure internet, since the cost is roughly thirty three dollars a month. So I've been forced to devote time to my meat body or disconnected intellectual pursuits. Without the internet as a distraction I have watched all one hundred and fourteen DVDs that I own. I push vigorously through books that generally would bog me down. I don't favor the realists, I go for more modern and postmodern authors, but Irving's Cider House Rules has been exceptionally riveting since I have passed that challenge to all novels, chapter one.

Currently I remain occupationally challenged, a cure that I will have to purge in January in order to pay utilities. I am unsure about what employment to seek. I know that I would be unwilling to have a career. I still hope to live a ludic and extraordinary lifestyle, and the only foreseeable method of attaining that is to finish my novel, or a few, and become published. My first novel remains in infancy which troubles me greatly. I keep pushing to work on it, but other characters bloom in my mind and the only way to keep them from overgrowing into a blanket of madness is to release them, mainly in screenplays or plays.

The Epicurean lifestyle disturbs me far less than my lover, distanced as she usually is. I can survive on fifteen dollars of food a week, and still spend the nights with my compatriots. My beau feels that a certain level of income is required for requirements sake. How stressful it must be for her to deal with my doctrine of work powerfully when passion strikes. At the same time I understand that the systems that exist will make every effort to remove me if I don't offer them the tithe of my slavery. So the option then retrogresses to where I should seek employment.

Even then the suboption of also returning to school to qualify for a summer in England haunts even that realm. I know that I don't want loans or to partake in any endeavor that I don't have actual means to pay for. Deficit spending is a paradise of fools. The trick with returning to the realm of "education," which I only now understand is not just coincidently the root of reeducation since learning is gone and obedience is in, is that I do not wish to go. Though it may be the coals to cross for a lovely summer of London debauchery.

Options options everywhere and none of taste without stink.

I've been doing so much more digital painting than writing lately. I'm so sorry, oh loyal fans, if you exist.

These are my original works, do not reproduce. Feel free to use as wallpapers or other personal use. Don't sell or claim ownership. Please don't print unless you want to send me a negotiable sum, if you want one I can send some of these as whatever size you want.

These are some of my favorite nonvectors. Sorry you don't get any vector paintings because I don't feel like rendering anything.

Criticism welcomed. I would love some input.

-Tommy

Like Zarastrutha I have spent these past months in relative solitude. Electronic means has afforded some companionship. Friendship without voice or body, electronic ghosts, caused only a desire for more pure interaction. By pure luck a conversation across wires wove its way into the realm of the physical.

In high school, if you can remember it, one develops many different types of associates. Some friends are without basis within the premises of the edifice except possibly before and after school. Those friends lurk in the corners of your house at all hours. Other friends come from mutual long term electives: band, football, and rotc mates. The friend that this story is about hails from the purest survival instinct. A person whom originally you have little noticeable commonality, but due to the arrangement of a seating chart your proximity is forced. Our first interactions were within the context of Algebra II. The most incompetent of teachers, Miss Franks, supposedly taught the class.

A truth about high school: a poor teacher can be easily noticed if she gives notebook grades. The more points that are assigned to it, the more bottom barrel the educator. In this class the notebook earned 20% of your average.

I spent at least one in every three class sessions in the office. You would think that since I despised the teacher so, I, the hooligan extraordinaire, kept the teacher from her duties. This was not the reason for my banishment. Her teaching had left the mostly non-autodidact students bemused. I took it upon myself to assist them with their work and explain hazy concepts to the masses. This was considered talking during class time, even when the teacher wasn't up giving lesson. She wanted questions to come to her. When she left I made rounds helping the students and filling in the blanks of the lesson. I'll admit that I even assisted them on tests when the ill-fated Franks was away. This is not to say I cheated or gave them answers. I assisted them through the problem, to give them a working understanding. After a year of my complaints, she did actually get moved into an administrative position, away from the poor souls of students.

This teacher, as most notebook test types do, had us sit in a seating chart. The chart did not come from any rationalized order, to my perception. We were not seated in alphabetical order or divided away from our friend groups. Through this chance juxtaposition I ended up next to an intriguing band girl. She loved Jesus and played clarinet. She read series of fantasy novels. Despite her deep attachment to the nailed one, she longed for emancipation of thought. During the passing period, we would have mild discussions although at the time she was secondary to those I knew better.

Eventually we became aware that we had one of the lunch periods together. I sat with a group of band members and free thinkers, and she easily found a seat being already friendly with the band kids. At these lunch tables we would have comical and insightful conversations about politics, god, and quintessential high school lewd sexuality.

The next years we would have classes together, and always arranged ourselves to be a desk apart when possible. Our discussions became more personal and dealt more and more with my philosophies and her relationships with god and politics.

After high school she took the initiative to message me over AIM. We kept this type of correspondence on at least a monthly basis. Due to my recent solidarity I have been online more, at the same time as the increase in the difficulty of her courses have caused electronic communication while doing homework to be her primary means of non-scholastic communication.

Eventually, our close proximity, at the scales I am now living in, of one and a half hours travel time caused us to visit each other. First I went down to cook her dinner. This weekend she came up for us to work on her laptop.

We have had a jolly time. We played soul calibur, she helped me baby sit, we practiced martial arts, I said curse words and prayed to her Kubuntu partition, and today we rearranged Katie's room. We have secured each other as, trite as the term may be, best friends.

This though has brought to light certain demons of my relationship with Emily. Emily and I do not have similar interests on the more specific end. With Laura I can talk for hours about books, politics, religion, and philosophy, where Emily and I are strained to have serious discourse for longer than twenty minutes. Being with Laura was also new and passionate. I haven't had a serious newish friend for a long time. I forgot the joy of being a predator, trying to find borders of discussion or new topics of interest, doing research and reconnaissance on a person, and finding the unexpected.

This caused Emily and I to have quite a discussion. We both have been lonely for the passion and excitement that we once had together. She expressed her desire to talk big people talk with me, but as always she is uninterested in those topics. She feels always that she is attempting to impress me, but never can.

This comment... This comment eviscerated me. The damnable hex of words removed all inertia left within me.

My relationship with my father remains mostly nonexistent. The most I've heard of him in the past year is in the background of my brother's cell phone. I fear becoming like my parents more than almost anything else. My brother and I have always sought to impress or make proud my father. The rarity of honest reception of his praise caused my brother and I to participate in things that were completely against our nature. Even those things could not buy his love. When Emily said that she felt similarly, my heart's palpations traveled into an abyss. I have since the earliest days of our relationship attempted to let her know of my feelings for her. I tell her in both print and aural forms how much I love and appreciate her, but she says she still feels this way.

Such gloomy discourse troubled me greatly. The rest of our conversation that night contained mostly bliss. I fear she feared causing me such distress again. Thus my friendship with Laura has assisted me two fold. First, I have made a borderline acquaintance/friend into a close friend. Secondly, our relationship has helped my relationship with Emily to be analyzed for the assistance of our perpetual kaizen.

________

In other news, my progress in moving to Shreveport has been recently dampened by Laura (Michael's mom, not new friend). This past week instead of searching for a vehicle, I have been attending to her errands. This probably won't delay my exodus, since I can just rent a uhaul to drive to Shreveport. Perhaps I will delay another week since the days I planned occur during fall break, and my friends may not be there to assist in the moving.

Since yesterday I attached Jesus to Final Fantasy, I thought I might as well attach Bush to Pokemon.