[ And I shouldn't have to state this, but please don't re-post entire entries of mine (rattusphere.com) or the photographs of the artwork in them (also made & owned by rattusphere.com) without acknowledging where you got the content from (rattusphere.com), which is here. Really, re-posting my artwork is something you need my expressed permission for, if taken directly from my site and posted at another without a credit to myself as the author of it, and if you're being sponsored or have ads on your site and make an income from a post you've taken from me, legally I'm owed part of your salary. The same is said for the "text," if you source some or all (an entire entry word for word) and do not cite me as the author of that original content, you're stepping all over my liberties and I'm being honest here; it plain gets in my face and hurts. ]

I’m crying like an idiot. It’s been a while, I’m giving myself a little room to downgrade from artistic mechanical wonder machine to real flesh and blood (which is supposed to invoke, on some level, the human machine pondering its humanity, its “being-ness.”)

On the way home from a friend’s house tonight I was thinking about the “mechanized humanity.” This sense or compulsion that we as a culture have to leave behind a trace of ourselves in everything we do for those that come after us; years from now, decades from now, and lifetimes from now. We mark our work, our words, our images with traces distinctly ours. We record, archive, copy, back-up and forward to infinity, parts of ourselves, that in the past, were merely a self collective pool of being and reflection.

We seek identity through our lingering “bites,” our data trails faintly marking just how far and from where we were created. Our bones and flesh no longer smelling of rot and squirming with those that seek to live on us after our demise, but instead, our stench is now that of falling site hits, un-kept web pages, out-dated link sources, and error 404 codes. Have you been dug, tagged, tweeted, blogged? No? Who are you then?

If you’re not the context, what context is there?

Mr. Pickman passed away while I was out tonight. I’m, at this point, as emotionally flat as I could be without being in a coma. Over this past weekend, I had taken him down the shore for what I had called “The Death Watch.” When you own rats long enough, you start to see signs long before they actually “go.” Mr. Pickman started last week, over the weekend he got worse; barely breathing, bleeding out of his ear for a period of time. Late Saturday I cleaned him up, held him for a while and it seemed to lift his spirits. He started drinking and eating again. The last two days he seemed better than he had last week.

He is stiff in his last breath’s pose in the corner of his cage now. I can’t touch him tonight. But come tomorrow, I’ll have to pull out the shovel and dig. His body will be colder than it is now and his eyes dull.

Now I’m crying.

So many things have come together at this moment; months of hard work, emotional and physical, but at the same time, so many things are falling apart; emotional and physical. People say things like “you look good, what are you doing different?”

I look inside myself, reflect on what I know I want to say and say instead what -they- want to hear, something bland. “working out, eating better, living life.”

When I’m alone after that I call myself a hypocrite, because I should be honest, I should answer: “My sins are eating me from the inside out, do you see my skeleton? It lives now here too, with me, and the thinness stretched over my weakened frame is hardly capable of maintaining this illusion.”

or

“If you pluck hard enough at my stretched humanity, flesh-like and pulled over a collapsing bird-like rib, I can play you my song and you will know of my indifference.”

I loved you Mr. Pickman. Thanks for all the peanuts you fuzzy bastard.

Mr. Pickman R.I.P. - August 19th 2008 © rattusphere.com

Now that the last piece of that past is gone, I won’t and don’t have to think of you, ever. Those filthy pieces still attached in me, gnawing at what goodness I think I have left: they are free to go. The spirit of that time and place set free with the breath of ghosts.

Things that suck. SUCK. SUCK.