“And I know I make the same mistakes everytime, bridges burned, I never learn, at least I did one thing right. I did one thing right.” – TS

Now if I could just figure out what that one thing was.

Call it what you want to.

Man, those typography videos just nail it for me. Even the parts that are a little obvious or formulaic; all in all they’re just grand. I love — love! — the canvas scrolls, so that it feels like the camera is tracking across this larger, unseen space, where all the words are cascading and morphing in all across the whole. And typewriter fonts. . . well, I probably should have realized that would have been enough to sustain me when I first played with moving them around on screen seventeen years ago. Damn, Scott, you should’ve gone deep on the typewriter fonts when you had a chance. Could be making Taylor videos from your parents’ basement by now.

“All the drama queens taking swings // jokers dressing up as kings.”

Hmm… which of those three am I? On any given day, some of all three. Perhaps mostly the joker, although I do seem to enjoy the drama lately more than I expected myself too. My misanthropic guise is slipping daily.

I give myself a B+ for today; probably just a straight B for execution, but the plus for insane effort. I definitely tried for an A. Well, today, which is kind of faded into yesterday already, but still feels like today. You know how that is.

{So can you tell this is another of those middle-of-the-night Dark Wake posts? Like hot off the metal and into the Cloud? So perilous; so fun; so bizarre to read them again twelve hours from now, trying to remember this state of mind, and it seeming like it must have belonged to someone else. What fun. -Ed.}

“Starry eyes sparking up my darkest night.”

Things at work — you may recall the ‘everything has changed’ bit — uh, for those of you who are lost, it was +52 — 26 days and 33 posts ago — things at work are continuing apace. [No, unhelpful autocorrect, not “Apache”. Trust me; I was an English major before the computers learned to spell. “Apace” is a word. Jezum Crow, it’s like nobody appreciates the archaic form anymore.] Which is to say that it’s like I’ve got this donkey. He’s a stubborn motherfucker of a donkey; like, won’t take yes for an answer kind of stubborn. And we’re stuck halfway between hell and high water, so I’ve gotta get ’em to town. (Let’s call him Stan.) So Stan the donkey and I are on the road; I’ve got a lead rope on him, and I’m pulling in the direction we need to go; I mean, of course it’s the right direction — haven’t I been down this road a dozen times before? But no — Stan wants to go towards just about any other point of the compass rose, or to just stand still and wait for fate or retribution to smoke him into ashes and regrets.

So I’ve gotta pull him, just enough to get his feet up, and yet only about an inch forward. Then I stop pulling. Wait. Wait | Wait | Wait. Gauge him — still huffing? Weird donkey saliva still bubbling on his weird donkey lips? Or is he ready to move again? If ready, I pull some more — hard — but only another inch. See, I have to wait for stubborn Stan to forget that we just moved an inch a few minutes ago before he’ll let me move him another inch. It’s ludicrous; Sissyphus is lapping us on a regular basis, and laughing his ass off as he does. “Rock and Roll, Dudes!”, he says as he goes past. [Weird that, for some reason, Ol’ Siss speaks in Title Case. I do have to wonder what he’s listening to on those earbuds.]

So odd, dumb Stan and I are stuck on the road, one inch forward at a time, with thunderheads looming and one of those freaky, barn-killing sideways winds coming; fifty degrees colder than it just was a couple hours ago. “L E T ‘ S . G O . S T A N.”, I plead. “For fuck’s sake, we’ve already been waiting so long; let’s go!”

Goddamn Stan.

“My castle crumbled overnight, I brought a knife to a gunfight, they took the crown but it’s alright.”