a tractor ran over my legs

We use the old-time Ferguson's shaft to run the big yellow auger. I was just to the left of the big wheel there. Hadn't run it in awhile. Pulled the wrong lever.

My exact thought was "holy shit, the tractor is actually running me over" however this came out of my mouth as, and I quote, "WHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUGH!!!"

I fell backwards. It got me around the knees. I pulled myself away in case it'd roll back, or just decided to turn around and come after me, but it ran into the grain bin and died. I thought "well, I won't be severely injured because I'm special. wow, I can't believe I'd really think that. But it's probably only happening because it's my fault as I did something incredibly stupid... I can't believe I'm thinking all this while I'm maybe losing the use my legs." But again, this came out as "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! AAAAAAAAAAH!"

I fished my cellphone out of my pocket and called my mom in the house "The tractor ran over my legs, come outside, the tractor ran over my legs..." She was on her way. The phone went back in my pocket.

Where was the blood seeping through and out the bottom of my jeans? Whatever exactly my legs wanted to tell me was caught in a thick vise of pain. I reached down afraid there was just soft burger patty connecting my thighs to my shins, bones hanging crooked - but I was solid. Just needs a little more screaming. Mom came looking for what was left of me under the truck (she thought I'd said "truck") then noticed me wave. I, laid out on the ground like today's fresh catch, explained what happened the way you'd ever hear Jim explain anything and calmed her down. "If you could just get me a drink of water and an ambulance."

I felt like I was handling this pretty well.

Soon enough ambulance came; cutting open my jeans, it amazed a couple techs but X-rays confirmed - I had no broken bones. And there were going to give me a helicopter ride! Not that my right leg isn't basically a decoration for awhile, a tasteless one at that - something out of the '70s blotched with an almost translucent-green. However, it'd helped bump the tractor over the left, which is already strong enough I can get by with crutches. Oh, and I skinned my elbow. But much like an old movie policeman, I was one day from retirement (for the season); now I just can't visit the Lairds out west too soon.

But back at that moment, this was clearly an opportunity for a writer. Catastrophe ought to obliterate bullshit, so if I wanted to realize some truth I'd better get to it.

First, I appreciated how cracking jokes (about cracking other things) is important to me. I'd been thinking unhappy thoughts. I don't have to! Maybe it's all just to keep my mind busy. Second, I want to know every truth; I don't think I'll have enough adrenaline left for it all. Third... god dammit.

No, gotta remember my schtick - stop asking god to damn everything, kids, in case it's starting to pay attention...

I pulled myself onto better grass. I looked at the sky past the bins and felt it's own clarity become mine. A bird was finishing a circle overhead - watching me, I thought, flat on my ass again. Birds, always looking down on me... then I realized it was missing a few feathers of its own.

Probably wanted to see what all the screaming was about.

quote of the day

"Amateurs work until they get it right. Professionals work until they can't get it wrong." - GM ad

worst. spring. ever.

The latest, longest planting season, that is. I feel fine.



That's the Wabash this weekend. That used to be corn over there.

Not Trapp Farms' though. We only lost 10 acres. The rest we can sell for twice the previous record high.

everybody read this:

Dreaming Reality: How Dreams Keep Us Sane or Can Drive Us Mad

You'll sleep better.

dreaming and schizophrenia
interview with this guy

---

You don't have to do this one (but a friend of mine made it and asked me to pass it along):

http://www.averagegames.com/games/bridgebasher/

How else were you wasting your time today?

chemical pre-action

It may have only been the trans-sexual lawyer that gave me any good advice. Of course, I only thought I was there to bribe my brainwashers.

"Keep moving, keep meeting people," Rose said, holding the truth in those thick manicured hands, "Pay attention to chemistry."

This was from her commentary on mistakes, after hearing about my own. I have held onto this advice in particular, as it cost me $750. Just another item to the mounting expenses of my schizophrenia at the time - but that is a long story you'll have to pay to hear someday. I digress - it was good advice, part of the package of psychotic wonders internal and external I am still paying off.

The moving I am doing, as I have been farming and trucking - I was in Cleveland the other weekend, actually - I was even briefly in the moving business itself. Soon I'll have enough to take the Ulysses itself for our summer road trip. Meeting is harder. This brings me to the third suggestion: chemistry, which is even trickier. I am still too crazy for other schizos, too schizo for business, too business for magick, too joking for anything else... The end-point of my trip is to crash the Ulysses back thru the larger world, then in fact steal things, places, and people to continue building my own little world... until it expands and outflanks yours.

When I remember my delusional disorder, I can generate mega-watts of optimism for SexaConglomoTechCorp, the Chronotrono cycle of plays, Kyote, hyperpoop and all, and I feel powerfully okay about everything I've gone through. I walked until my feet bled but I have my answer. However, the questions which open up when you backpack across the infinite abyss can really leave you wondering... and I am at most times imagining a half-dozen potential outcomes scarier than you'd ever come up with... but it's just as often, where is everyone?

"In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything." - from the Spiritual Brain

There is a problem about feeling meaning I cannot quite shake. To say something is meaningful is to say it conveys information. It does not just feel meaningless if there's nothing to convey, but if there is nowhere to convey.

Not that this is a lame outreach program to anyone, or putting up a wall to open windows. I had a cookie that tried to help, "Friendship is the key to the answer you are seeking." But read carefully - it is only the key, not he answer itself or even the door.

Even Tiny Toons were wrong - the meaning of life is not your friends; it is just something that you usually make with them. This is probably just another reason why the original Looney Tunes were far superior. You can't get by merely a little looney. Don't half-ass this, people.

In my experience, wide and so far, the door is your mind. The answer is your soul.

It takes the right combinations. But it's as simple as getting off - your unique, potent balance of lusts, loves, and needs. I spent a long time looking for what is right. The result is, now I am the writer.

Which leaves it a case of my rights versus yours.

[music cue]

epicenter

4:37 AM, April 18th - Magnitude 5.2 earthquake in the Wabash Valley Seismic Zone. The epicenter was, in fact, underneath one of my family's farms. In fact, just the one I'd been at the day before. My brother and I took a tractor's GPS to the exact location.

It looked pretty amazing.

As I remarked to said brother, the quake didn't damage anything that didn't already need repaired. He laughed, so it must have been true. Just a few older churches cracked and one lost some chandeliers. NO INJURIES. The quake, however, was unusually long for the magnitude (~40 seconds here) and over four days there's been 23 aftershocks and related quakes.





Geologists did come but planted their instruments more convenient to the road and went home. We keep our natural disasters low-key here.

state of the union

Well, this is about how it stands, boys and girls.

I'm wintering in my safehouse in the swiss alps (no, not my parents...) where there's nothing to do but read, write and go to the 24hr gym. Thus I am achieving far greater results in those three areas than I did this fall roaming in wide circles. As my physical health is known to parallel my mental, it looks like I'm doing well in both those regards (and my mind's shoulders are getting broader... I'm broader-minded!) I'm also getting a CDL; I may need a bigger truck someday.

I'm essentially waiting for a sign about where to circle come spring. By that I mean either spilling ink on a map that eerily makes a pentagram around a city, or a response letter. Or a mysterious phone call in the middle of the night that's cut off by gunshots. There's a couple other dreams to pursue too. But this is what I'm taking:

1 practicing mage (willing to teach!) and junior mad scientist-artist and uncanny business-man

1 sublime box truck plus accessories plus used books

3 companion robots, in some form

6 produce-able shows:
SexaConglomoTechCorp Re-presents William Shakespeare's Hamlet (A Comedy) - as seen at UIUC
Pappy's Old-timely Good-fashioned Phonophonetic Extra-grammaticalically Engorged Double-Crappin’ Whoopdedoodooery! - my final load of new sketches, including a one-act Earth vs Santa Claus
10,001 Siberian Nights - the sketch-play of my most anomic shorts
Theater of the Darned - my MST3K-like thing, set in new continuity
Jim Trapp: The Movie - the funniest play I've ever written, funnier
Elvis and the Beatles LIVE from Outer Space (or The King and the Bugs) - surefire hit

1 treatment for a screenplay:
a comedy-horror film, Illinois vs... What the Hell Is That - Oh my God! It's Coming - No! OH MY GOD! No! NO STOP!

3 series concepts:
shorts following SCTC employees in our world,
season one of Kyote (!),
and a sci-fi show I'd describe as Star Trek meets The Office (except not.)

In that order.

EDIT: Earth vs Santa Claus was my last great unfinished full-length, begun way way back in 2003. Finishing it is like writing with another person and the least fun I've had since, well, the last time I tried writing with another person. While charming, I decided I liked it twice as much half as long - so I slashed mercilessly and spliced it into the new Whoopdedoodooery. After which, I am officially out of the sketch comedy business.

Then there's my astonishing true tales of schizophrenia which pretty much demand a memoir and, I think for the visuals alone, a film or documentary which I would insist on calling Jim Trapp: The Movie: The Movie.

Also, purely for fun, I've started my own band - Jim and the Invisible, Intangible Space Dragons Who Can Kill You in Your Dreams (and Who Also Do Not Smell or Make Noise of Any Kind). This actually catches the "generally screwing around" portion of my endeavors, and if you had to categorize it somewhere between Captured by Robots and a Neo-futurist one-man show with a lot of humming.

Then I have two options that require collaborators:

hyperpoop.com - humor, strangeness, and generally a real-world observation center (plus experimentation i.e. where I'd pour my guerilla urges). almost like any student magazine, except driven (as always) by my own demographic and willing to make a little news here and there.

Ma's + Pop's - my fabled novelty/hardware/snack shop ship, adrift since it lost its initial unsinkable location. a small crew and a new course (and courses) and I think it could fill that important niche between hipster coffee shop and fattie diner and fantasy funland. and I need someplace that'd actually let Jim and the Invisible, Intangible Space Dragons play.


Also, in good news I can now afford to get rid of the godaddy ads but added google's, with its wonderful Trapp-themed merchandise ("Trapp candles - for the scent of Trapp!"). It's like adding extra jokes I don't even have to write.