That's all ya got?

I'm scared now.  Energy has been dispersed and thoughts are trying to kick in.  The physiological responses to this type of stress do not seem to have completely changed yet.   I just fought off a rush of adrenaline and panic.  Some where in my head I thought of running to the bed and hiding from the light in the room.  as I sit here writing this I feel as if I am un worthy of the opportunities before me. as if by some stretch of my own imagination i am trying to convince myself to let the confidence fade and return to the easy comfortable way of doing nothing.

  But I don't want or need this right now.  I've got a cliché to edify, a life to reclaim, and a risk to take.  So just creep up on me a bit there old school thought patterns and awkwardly triggered aging neural pathways.  IF that's all ya got then I should be popping a bottle of Champaign.

Keys Fingers

(keys fingers )

rhythm that lingers

this moment

(frost steam)

vapors.

I Have been writing this one song for three years. It isn't rocket science and I am not attempting a rock opera. So it's not some sort of arrogant artist bullshit. It's just that sometimes when I sit down to write, ideas just flow. My soul is laid bare and I just float along the path. Some times its poems some times its angry rants some times its awkward blog posts and sometimes it's a song. I have to say that songs are by far my favorite thing to write. I have an additional method for communication. I would damn near equate the human vocal pattern to a form of body language. Stresses and volume differences and slight timing changes all in concert. and alive, each time I perform the wrong it will be different. I will make an error in this or that or the other and will swing by without too much ass kicking but essentially the song will be different each time. not a facsimile of the original. There is so much freedom to manipulate a song to change a strum or a chord variant or any number of other things that you are free to use to your message.

And for me it's pure. I've never sat down to write a type of song, or to mimic a type of music. I just hit the damn strings and the creative juices start to lubricate the mind enough to allow me to try things to feel things to make merry music mayhap? So sometimes I don't know what the song is about, and because I can't break the mental block on it I can't complete its creation.

So the song is called starting over, for obvious reasons. I try to express that even though I may not know the message I am still trying to convey something.... and sometimes I just have to sit and wait and be non confrontational. I can't believe i have been writing this for three years and have just come to understand its purpose for me in life. I think that music like all other products of creativity an outcome of necessity. Something in me needed to grasp this message of hands off tough love type shit. This one's for you Jim.

http://soundcloud.com/jaedpact/11132010-starting-over-mp3

True stream of conservativeness.

I recently started looking for people to play music with. I decided that i would post in the musicians section of Craigs list:

I'm a newish guy to the band mates thing... Shit how does one do this: Hey there I am a totally confident somewhat talented guy who can sorta play guitar but has some decent original songs in a needs work condition..... Yeah thats about right. Names Jason I'm 28 I have played acoustic guitar for over a decade but that isn't to imply that I could meet your demand to hammer out a major pentatonic scale ( warning I just made up that string of words) it would suggest however that I am comfortable with expanding my skills and meeting the needs of jamming and playing in the starter level of a band. I don't own a home studio I dont have what ever the **** pro gear implies but I do have calloused fingers a soulful approach to song writing and a pretty bad ass little Talkamine g330 that hasn't treated me wrong yet. I want to jam man just get together and play some music hit me back if you're over 21 years old an in a similar condition.

I've had tons of responses which is new and different for DFW, kind of feels like there might be a bit of an art scene revival. Odd considering Texans recently voted to create such a super majority for the GOP. Why would it be that I would consider an increase in Republican presence and power as a decrease in human creativity and expression? Lets dive into that one shall we? I think that my growing up in the bible belt might have something to do with it. Or there is perhaps the penalty for an accurate description of political preference.

CONCERVATIVE the concept hits me some place between cerebral and soulful. I think of Pentecostal women, of southern Baptist churches boycotting Disney movies, I recall the time my sister burned her cd collection at the behest of a youth minister. Minister o the youth at a nondenominational church. These concepts of conservatism are directly related to morals, value systems and hypocrisy. I rationally know that this has no bearing on the representation of the fiscal views of either of the two major political parties. But there is something about the unfolding of the agenda of the right wing that strikes me as being slightly inhuman, frigid maybe? I don't know. I think the problem is a lack of education. Maybe I just don't know enough about the systems in play to understand what I am feeling about them. I like the idea of reigning in power, of creating real time transparency where available. Audit the Fed and all that jazz. But I fear the outcome of holding too closely to the free market society. To be honest I don't think that either models of operation are correct, I think there has to be an in between out there. Furthermore I believe that Barack Obama is a representation of the concept but that his efforts were so far out of line with the expectations that the old boys club expected that he had no choice but to aim for the moon with his administration knowing full well that there was only going to be a bit of mediocrity. I wonder. Truly wonder what things would be like if this man were a white man. I think he would be equally hated by both sides giving too much to one to make them work with the other can cause resentment in the small minded politicos of today. And the unfortunate truth is that some things do transcend race.

And then enter the Tea Party: I find that most of these folks have a few things in common. A desire to reduce the size of government and a desire to see a third party movement succeed. The Tea Party as it was in 2008 was something to see, a phenomenal example of the internet's power to unite peoples and raise funds and influence change. My interpretation of the current myriad of persons sporting a "Tea Party" logo is that there are a lot of people that seem to believe that xenophobic, homophobic opinions are accepted and are in fact examples of the mind set of Tea Party members. I believe the downfall to have been the very concept that the tea party guys want to enforce and uphold. you might say that they out conservative themselves. Money Bombs. Remember that vulgar name? Just a few years after 9/11 and in the midst of a recession it became popular to request and organize frequent internet based fund raising. "Let's break records" and other such encouraging slogans floated through my inbox with such frequency as to create a nice sold retinal scar. When the control was small or even pure, and by that I mean that it was not really lead by a single person but was truly a representation of citizens fears and concerns the money involved was a respected force. IF we follow the money we see that is no longer the case: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/oct/25/tea-party-koch-brothers

I believe the Tea Party movement is completely subverted by GOP interests and agendas. And that by so doing the G.O.P. has successfully destroyed a possible third party uprising. Leaving all these people that vote libertarian and "tea Party" un satisfied. Their change didn't come, it was raped and stolen.

I started writing this post about 2 hours ago, it started as a story about a weird guy i met in order to try and find a way to play music again, but instead I went into a political slant. I write everything prior to actually reading the full article that i posted here and prior to actually watching the video I have linked here. seems like a case of God smack to me.

Meds or not to meds that isn't the question

I got to jump in on this line of thought while its here in the frontal area.

I remember once talking to my Father about anti Depressants and I remember him saying " Why would I want to forget the things that have hurt me? I don't need some pill to make me forget what happened I am not that weak." My response in my mind was " So I am weak now?" This is a turning point for me. A moment in the hear and the now where I could see some associated thought patterns emerge. I sit here thinking that it was a closed minded approach to the problem at hand, it was a willingness to avoid correction of a problem. It was a willful request for pain in other words. Why forget the pain? why keep it?
One could argue that the precess of reflecting upon the lessons of pain is a virtuous and long lived human experience. Without pain how do we evolve and all that other existential mental masturbation i could go into. I thought of it as petulant and useless and non-progressive. but the truth is that I had the same sort of resistance to attending counseling of any kind. In my mind that was the next step, the next little chip on the scale of sane versus insane. I have had some rather stormy interpersonal relationships as a result of my ability to cut through what I believe to be bullshit, but that pisses people off... yeah i can see that kind of like you dont want your only picture in the Senior year book to be that of you getting knocked the fuck out by the big kid on campus. If I can see into your bullshit and tell you that I can; make you understand that I can, then I am no longer the person you want to hang with. I have to wonder if there is a fundamental violation that I am committing in some way. I think not, I think that it is the right of everyone to speak their piece, I would prefer that it is done in a respectful manner but hey I gots a temper too Chief.

So I avoided counseling, I procrastinated and allowed for reasons and excuses to not become a "Mental Health patient". You guys are gonna hate this.... but there is a profoundly negative stigma for person diagnosed with Anxiety disorders within the medical field at large. When i was working in at Methodist Dallas Medical Center I was fortunate enough to expand my skill set to dealing with post op gastric bypass patients. Now that i think about it I am not sure fortunate is completely accurate in this situation. There are certain patterns that nurses can expect to see and work with in any specialty. Ortho nurses know certain things about traction and casts and the ins and outs of surgical wound dressing. Oncology nurses have thiers etc. Well one of the things that i noticed with all of these patients that were coming in to receive bypass surgery held the diagnosis of "GAD" Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I recall having a conversation with another nurse whom probably had a similar Body mass index that I do. If you guys know me IRL then the picture has been painted of a fat hairy guy that looks a lot like but isn't Jim Dyer. At any rate this other nurse and I were discussing some rather strange behavior that we noticed between one of the patients and his visitor. The patient in question was 20 is h male with bright purple hair had actually come up from Austin to have the procedure performed. His visitor was a woman in her 60's easily and thats where it got wierd.... we couldn't determine how to classify that relationship Surely it wasnt related to sex right? Butthen there was that one thing that she was just doing.... odd. Please understand that nurses know people, we are frequently meeting and caring for people of al kinds of composition. So fucking wierd people catch out eye. So as I start to let my sence of humor get involved with the facts my coworker cuts me flat off and says "you know I just don't care you know all these people have mental issues." Incidentally i was asked what phase of the bypass program I belonged to by at least 4 of my patients.... awesome.

reengage

It has again been a super long time since i have updated my blog here. There are some hesitation I have regarding the amount of true detail that i give out to friends family and lurkers alike. I remember stumbling upon this blog again and thinking that I wanted to disperse the poetry that i had written.

See, the thing is, when i write most of my poetry it is a very fast experience, just flies out of me hits the paper like a Rorschach blot and I forget about it. Then i come back to it forever later and think Damn who wrote that? Then I see my by line and it's like what really? All this is to say that some times I am surprised by what i have forgotten that I have written, that I forget to read my non poetry posts.

There have been some vast changes over the last two years and it is an odd feeling to see my post below about the desire to set an appointment with some sort of mental health practitioner. I never actually got the balls to do that on my own. Not in the proper and expected manner I suppose. Instead at a particularly mediocre point in my life I decided that my best plan of action for having a good time and repairing a laptop was to try to steal a hard drive worth about 50 mucks but priced at 89 from Fry's electronics. 'twas fail extreme. I think i disappointed the pretty boy blonde that was looking for a tussle at the door. I just kinda stood there even though I became aware too late that there were about 7 dudes ready to tango with Jason. I had more than enough cash on hand to pay for the HDD...... wait lets do this right :

Ok so little back story for this event. I have been ingesting Effexor according to my Dr.'s orders for about two years at this point, I have not gone to counseling at all. This is a rather interesting sub topic that I will expand upon in another post, but for now just know that I thought i was doing everything that I was supposed to. I got introspective, I acknowledged some mental Health issues and i was medicated..... I felt like nothing was happening and asked to switch to different meds. In order to facilitate that my doctor and I decided that it was necessary to wean the meds back, which we did. I had no idea what life was going to be off of these meds that i had been on fairly regularly for years. Try to remember the most frustrated unconfident moment you have ever had. Probably a moment as a teenager where in your sexuality or other form of self description was in scrutiny of a bully that you both liked as a friend and wanted dead...... Confused? Good thats the point. My head was not on right it was as if some one just gave me rage. "Hey guy have this" and then boom all hulked out and shit. so not an excellent excuse for deciding to steal a hdd but apparently it was enough background information for me to be accepted into a Mental Health Diversion program.