#515

Post 515! Well, well, well. There is so much to say about this number! Other shit be on my mind, though, so I shall content myself with saying the information that 5:15 is a good Who song. That would be The Who, whomst I am reffering to.

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Like within a comic strip, there is information in and about a blog that ought to be needlfully repeated if the blog is to be sensible to the reader by executing an internal logic. In my pointless yet extremely zestful quest for as much variety as I can fit into a given canvas or tapestry or tesselation or composition, whatever (did you know that I have painted the walls of my house ten different solid colors, and that I have chucked and brushstroked like twenty different paints at a good chunk of the walls I left white? Man, I hate a bland sameness and a canvas you're "not supposed to touch") I may not provide enough reemphasis on important things. 

In brief, it seems to me that I do not reaffirm my own internal logic enough in this space.

I was thinking about that because I was wondering seriously, once again, if I might not be completely insane, off my chain and my rocker and a complete stranger to sense, in particular sense that is good or utile. I don't really believe so, but man, also, I cannot make sense of this world, and checking my impressions against the common logic does not provide me with comfort or surety of any kind.

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But whatever! The rules of making Factually Pointless are this:

• A post, once begun, must be either posted or discarded within 24 hours, unless I am working on a special project that went wrong. Special projects are subject to the same constraint if they go well, but I reserve the right to hold back certain elements of special projects when needful, such as the infamous Cutting Room Floor post. A good example of projects that went well and produced each of its posts within 24 hours are all the special projects undertaken last year: Factually Masculine, Factually Sportsmanlike and the Videos Game Saga. Also Factually Musical 2023.
• After I hit post, I have 48 hours to make content edits, cuts, and additions. After that, the post is final, unless I missed spelling errors or admit to myself that my syntax got completely out of control. I type a lot of words correctly, so I try not to be ashamed, but I find spelling errors all over the place even back to the first one hundred posts, which have been subject to this type of aftercare probably a dozen times. The problem, according to science, is that I already know what it says, so my brain just openly tricks me about what my eyes are seeing. Truly needling.
• Very occasionally I will give myself permission to add postscripts, or more than one, to a post. Sometimes this is because the last part of the post simply calls for one and it is part of the original post and other times I am formally making the exception and postscripting days or years after the fact, though these are, I think, usually labeled "edit" for clarity. Hopefully all of them, but I may have slipped. 
• I can't just go deleting posts even if I come to think they are ghastly and irresponsible. The blog is meant to be a type of record; it should thus be honest about my missteps, rashness, illogical conclusions, excessive  candor, terrible jokes, resolution-breaking, tantrums, and splits with reality.
• Read the disclaimer! It is on the sidebar, labeled Nutritional Facts. Over there →→→→→
• This blog has disclaimers for a fucking reason. I am a truly confused man who has read far more books and internet than is healthy for a brain and played way too many videos game hours completely alone. I started out pretty weird, became truly ruined, and you should absolutely not take my word for anything, no matter how compelling I am--verify, dammit, consider but do not just swallow. I would also like to not be rejected out of hand, but if you must pick one, go with the latter, even if it infuriates me when my ego is waxing. Also go ahead and remember that I am a dry alcoholic that has hallucinated extensively using chemicals and fungi and I smoke way too much weed. This can sometimes agitate my paranoia, as is well-known.
• It is difficult to tell the difference between my jokes, my hyperbole, and my seriousness. This is by design, and it makes everything more difficult for the reader, but this ambiguity is important. All honest thought requires negative space and admittance to ignorance, uncertainty, and doubt. Sometimes something is a joke one day and deadly serious the next, or different readers take different jokes and imperatives from the same screed. Thought is wobbly stuff, and that is to the good, I think--but all the more reason to READ THE DISCLAIMERS. Also if it is any consolation living with my own mercurial nature and mindset can cause extreme complications on my end, and I try to give you the least painful version of that experience. Usually. Sometimes I'll just straight up tell you that God fucked up making the universe and human beings in particular, and sometimes I'll just straight up tell you that it is perfect with every quark in its place and unfolding exactly as it should. Both are true and false. Every time you wake up, you are a new person in a new world, or everything is exactly the same. Etc.
• Special note about current events posts: they are the bane of this blog and the cross I bear in this life. I hate them and I hate the compulsion to even think about the things that form their genesis, let alone actually writing them out. It is a dark and fucked up evil twin to my love for history, and I formally apologize for it and for all its vile waste product. I constantly say that I am done making them, and I try, folks, but let me formally apologize in advance for the seemingly inevitable future ones. 

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There, that felt necessary! Happy 515. I think it fits the theme. Whatever that might be.

We are done here, and I am going to go listen to Who songs as I play video games until a tree guy comes over so I can show him how bad these other tree guys fucked up my oak tree and he can tell me how much it will cost me for him to try and ameliorate the damage.

Boy, I need that new computer! I need a new computer. Couldn't we all use a new computer?

--JL

#514

Man, probably I have written everything I know into this blog twice, but I could do it for the rest of my life and not run out of different ways to say it, plus there is the living process of gaining and losing and regaining knowledge/enlightenment only to lose it again ad nauseum, plus there are functionally infinite ideas, events, and cultural artifacts to discuss, accompanied by true life stories I could tell every single day and never catch up to myself before I had to punch my ticket. I can think of about ten stories I could bang out about me real quick. This is not to brag--how will I ever stop?

Maybe I don't stop. Maybe this is the self-imposed metier for the rest of my span. I mean, I guess that's what being a writer is. 

Maybe I'll just do one immediately because my fingers are itching. GO!

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Me and the boys were out doing parkour downtown. Hell yeah. Fourteen years old, four motherfuckers with nothing to prove except we don't give a fuck and we're not scared to prove it. Qualifiers abound--but not where we would admit them even to ourselves. That is what makes teenagers dangerous like a pack of coyotes but brittle like burnt sugar. We leaped and vaulted, tucked and rolled, climbed shit we absolutely were not supposed to and took a specific flavor of ownership over everything we gazed upon.

Indeed, activities like this are not frowned upon because they are dangerous--except by moms. The Man doesn't give a fuck if you die, though of course he prefers to turn a tidy profit from the affair, e.g., it is a noble thing for a soldier to rape and kill for massive profits (not theirs; The Man's, just to be clear) until they would be so good as to die, that is what The Man likes best. A soldier is a good example because the worst thing a soldier can do, in the mind of The Man, is not die.

He gives a fuck about three things: having power and making sure people who don't act like they understand it and accept it; the ideal situation is for them to love it, love him for having it and for using it how he pleases: thus is he motivated to loosen his fist and let flow a dribble of honey to the favored. The third thing is to feel, even fleetingly, even the suggestion, that his power is false and all it takes to break it is to simply laugh and ignore him, to act as though he does not exist, and this is sensible: The Man is contingent on belief in him, and his power and his money are a lie our ancestors trapped us in by believing in him and feeding him and letting him live in our homes and our minds. 

Certain Men in public life would probably fucking straight-up stroke out and die if someone were to ignore them just right.

So it was only to add savor to our feelings of sheer selfhood and bounteous, free-breathing free-ass freedom when some apoplectic motherfucker in a shirt with cuffs and a collar tucked into beige pants came out of an air-conditioned building where he wears a figurative diaper all day to scream that we weren't allowed and he was gonna call the cops. We laughed and ran away in such a fashion that neither he nor many cops could match--our bodies processed our oxygen intake far more efficiently than theirs, even if they ran every day, we were effortlesstly flexible, and our athleticism was under the command of sharp, undulled senses and greasy-quick stimulus reflex in a way that even as I type this, basically can't remember. Have stayed fit and gotten lot stronger, but I could never in ten thousand years try to catch my fourteen-year old self doing parkour. Would be absolutely concussed to try. Anyway the screamer was a horizontal creature and we fled in three dimensions, but indeed, only to prove to him real quick that he could not catch us if he tried.

Shortly after this incident we were running by a hedge that ran in a square around a grassy gap. The hedge was trimmed above my hip level and was about three feet wide. Figured I could do it and rode the impulse, looked before I leaped, cleared the hedge no touch forward flip and did a forward roll onto the grassy enclosure. The boys hooted appreciatively without pausing their stride, but I had seen something out of the corner of my eye during my roll that gave me hard pause. As I bound to my feet, I took in fully the half-meter vertical closed iron waterpipe pipe sticking up, which I had rolled right next to, having missed it completely in my assessment glance. 

Well, it was a glance, you see.

Spent about another forty seconds studying its placement relative to my action and satisfied myself that if I had taken another pace or two before jumping, that pipe had a real decent chance of hurting me very badly; I would even confidently say that I would have brought the entire weight of my body headfirst straight onto it and been hashing out the reality of my "free-ass freedom" and its various implications with St. Peter.

As I caught up with my friends I studied my body's reaction to having come so close to death just having some fun, and chalked it up as a natural wink from the yawning vastness of the nonbeing that birthed me and to which I shall return one fine day. Which is to say that like a good monkey I laughed it off and kept playing in the sun.

But like a cold tooth lodged somehwere in the brain, that moment and that knowledge have been a part of everything ever since; a dense lozenge of slow-release maturation that even now glints at me from the depths.

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Factually Pointless may suffer an interruption of service, but I don't know when or if, really. All I know is that this man right here needs a new computer.

So anyway Peace! Love! Peace and Love on this Planet Earth! Other planets too! Any and all of them, really! I am the laughing monkey, and I turn away and leap into the sunshine! We are all going to die, some sooner, some later! ULTREIA, HOSSANA, PAX DEI, TERRA ET CAELUM

--JL

#513

So! The fuckin pope died. Made it to one last Easter after a dramatic wind-down, faced down one last daemond on that sacred day, and punched his ticket the morning after. As my friend Valentine quoth, "too plot-heavy."

Plot weight is essentially the main reason the Roman Catholic Church can claim it is the one true church though, and every time something like this happens, the mystic power only grows. It is banal at this point. 

It's a pope post! Don't read my blog. Factually Pointless is not kidding about its title.

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My big takeaway from Francis' papacy is that I didn't appreciate him enough when he was alive. Another terrible cliché. Yet indeed, behold: it is so. He was just a guy, only a dude, simply a man, as well as a pope. 

He was as much my pope, representative of me and who I am and what my values and hopes are, for this world and for the church, as I had any right to hope or expect in this or any lifetime to date, and I acted entitled to him. Acted as though his humility and self-effacement was a given at best, a hypocrisy or smokescreen at worst, and I doubted his commitment to the full scope of our shared humanity and his willingness and his ability to do the job as, in my arrogance, I believe it should be done. The fact that he was not superhuman, was not able to flex his muscles and with one swift gesture put asunder the entire hierarchy and establish peace and justice for all on this world, I interpreted as failure, and I turned my nose up at him.

But it's just a job, done by a guy. As one experienced in dealing with murderous, autocratic regimes and not getting his ass poisoned or shot, he navigated the treacherous whirlpools and breakers of being a pope. He made mistakes, but he was as much the pope he set out to be as the realities of this world allow for, when nothing would have been easier than to settle into a the most luxuriant possible retirement while momentum and the will of others took care of everything. 

Important to remember that a pope, if such is is his whim, can literally eat food all day long. If the pope wants to golf or look at fine art all damn day and let a couple of their favorite cardinals be pope, it is wholly within their power--moreso perhaps than any other worldly power, the pope has the power to let Jesus take the fuckin wheel. I mean, look at all the pedophiles. These guys don't get in because the church loves pedophiles. They get in because motherfuckers don't bother to make absolutely sure they don't. And it's not possible to get them all out at once because sometimes if you use knives instead of chemo you would cut a person into quivering chunks instead of curing their cancer. It seems like the same, but it is not the same. 

So. Much more could be said, but concentrating on the main takeaway. The whole time the best pope of my lifetime and maybe the most authentically Christian pope ever, like ever, like having popes is unchristian actually but here we are, getting away from but bringing it back to me being an asshole about it, and only now that he is gone do I see the miracle.

Typical. It really is just basic. This just goes to show that I probably would have started worshipping a golden farm animal in the few hours Moses was up the mountain. Sad!

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Now it seems to me like the big historical question is whether we will get one pope in the Vatican and one pope in Washington by executive order, Henry VIII-style, or the next pope is such an asshole we all just settle down and go about our other business, secure in the knowledge that the church serves power and is absolutely irrelevant otherwise, as is correct and proper and easy to digest.

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Happy Pope Remains Dead Day 2 or whatever it is. Rest In Peace Francis, you were alright and I love you and I'm sorry in my heart I was mean to you in thought and spoken word and in writing too. It is down to my childishness and hubris, and I will once again work on my humility and sublimation of ego in hopes of being a better person than the one who keeps thinking that the work ever ends or that the world has solutions instead of being God's perfect infinite story.

Do wish I'd written you that letter. Though it may be for the best that I did not.

Book of Job! Book of Job! PAX INFINITUM

--JL

#512

Feeling better. No time to deliver a post today, but I did want to indicate that this had developed.

It can be said that things got a whole lot worse before they got better--as is often the case, in my experience, but one does forget. And bless this forgetting, for how else would existence be possible?

Anyway. Happy Easter tomorrow, Christ is risen, the infinite universe makes equals of us all, holy, holy, fuck yes, hail Mary, hail Satan, hail the infinite light that radiates infinite light while losing nothing of its radiance and nothing of its completeness, that Flame Imperishable.

I love you all, even those who would destroy me. 

--JL

#511

Thought of the day, related to the last post:

Consciousness is a disgusting, inheritable disease. The idea that a "higher order" of consciousness infected us with this abortive, flawed operating system is as perfectly reasonable as any other irreperably underinformed notion that our finite and completely maladaptive code generators are capable of manifesting, and the intervention of alien species as reasonable as the idea of a surveilling creator-god or pantheon. This smorgasboard of illusion holds up generation after generation because one of the symptoms of our shared illness is to see that the collective mass of interacting symptoms plays out like a big horrible perfect shakespeare play if you happen to have a comfortable balcony seat, or can imagine one, as our diseased and overburdened brains are wont to do. 

Fucking goddamn things'll imagine fricking anything. Plus, because they are lazy on top of everything else that is wrong with them--cuntivorous and cocktivorous to the detriment of the psyche and the species, for instance--they will tend to repeat what they have seen before. So everything is still full-blown animal shit, even though by nature of iterating complexities and fractal growth it seems very different to the casual observer.

"Of course I am not a monkey! Look at my top hat! The top hat is a symbol--it shows that I am smart and beautiful, a god! I made a machine to think for me and solve all my problems because I am so smart and industrious! I am sure I did a good job because, see above, I am not a monkey! I am smart and beautiful, a god! I have the fanciest hat! I will repeat this, not quite the same way, until I die! And my children will repeat after me!"

Concussively stupid. Draining. Worse, I've written it before.

But I can save myself labor, if that's what interests me. There exists one convenient term to encapsulate all this: farce.

Utter farce.

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Must be very tired--things must be bad--because readers have actually checked in, concerned, that something worse than usual is wrong with me. 

Maybe. Thoughts of the day, related to my well-being in the here and now:

The farce has me down, and I am not in an accepting mode. Resentful of my impending desctruction, even though there is not one single solitary thing that I can do to avoid it and retain my selfhood, which is the only real possession I have--without it I am nothing. This seems obvious, but think about it. Maybe it was true for you and you already gave up the ole self-ghost a long time ago, just kept on doing stuff because everybody does stuff all the time and they incessantly bray that it is normal and good to always be running around busy and providing themselves and others with proofs of authenticity and badges of correct accomplishment. But that is farce. It's just not true that anyone has to do anything. They are kidding themselves with trinkets, but you don't have to let them kid you, though if you would prefer to be kidded that is perfectly fine.

Anyway, an impasse: there is nothing I want to do as I await destruction. All action is contributing to farce, and I am tired of farce. So I do the things I always want to do, farce or no farce: I read, and play, and paint, staying as much as possible in my dark room with the curtains drawn and the space heater cranked to max. I think in circles and speak as little as possible to anyone. This is an act of hypocrisy, wasteful and selfish, but it's mine, and it's all I am fit to accomplish.

The only thing left is to lose my guilt about it and be as honest as possible.

I am going to eat what food I have availabe and enjoy being warm and entertained at the expense of others weaker and less fortunate than myself, feeding off their pain and their pointless deaths until I also die in a futile and meaningless way.

Heidegger was right about everything. Getting raped by this farce means no one ever has to say they are sorry for anything, ever. That's what Dostoevsky said, too, and Jesus and the Buddha. It is up to you if you decide farce is farce because of phenomenology or because of God or because the truth of infinity means that everything must be. It doesn't matter which you pick because it doesn't affect anything, not even you. From here you can sell special insights by the immaterial pound or give them away for free.

You will either let everything go or keep right on having what you can get, clinging to your safety and rationalizing whatever you must in order to do so. As will I. Others will keep on wanting, or decide to destroy the world. Too bad for us all. But none of us are better or worse than the other. In fact, we are all one infinite thing.

There is no one to blame for this. No one to hold responsible. If everyone is guilty, no one is.

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Grappling with all this along with being unable to tear my eyes away has meant that I don't even bother to put on clothes anymore until I absolutely have to, and I am just flat-out not going to get a job. I feel fine, whatever. Exhausted. Just done.

This is my new "praxis": anti-resistant non-participation. If you get it and feel like getting in on it, you'll quit your job and peaceably wait for whatever is going to happen to just happen already with as much equanimity as you can summon.

The revolution has already begun!

*

Fun post next time. Why not.

--JL

#510

Still. Knowing it's all a big joke and knowing the joke is on me--I'm not laughing. Fuck it! If I'm the butt, I'm the butt. That's archery butt, by the way. The target of the joke, e.g. the archery butt. I am also the ass, though.

Fuck it. They say you can only be a target if you make yourself one, and even if it's not always true it is decidedly so in this case. So I am the butt and the ass on purpose, and wholly embrace it. Fuming pointlessly is the sweet business. I've earned this butthurt shitty feeling that won't leave me alone and intend to savor it.

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Speaking as a pretender to my own understanding, performing said farce is an act of steadily increasing hypocrisy. With each scrap of accumulated "knowledge", with the experience of each day attaching itself to the built-up wad of days that represents a life, the intensity and scale of one's personal hypocrisy grows and grows. Well, maybe I can only speak to mine. Maybe your knowledge is good somehow. Mine has proven itself false coin in every material way. 

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There have been times I knew how to laugh, and nothing else. Look through the archives and you will find them.

What I need is to become that person again, to give birth to myself again before the self-inflicted labor pains kill me.

--JL

#509

My cycles of ego overgrowth followed by slash and burn operations are coming into sharp relief for me now, but because of what they are, who I am, and what the world is, it would appear that I have little choice but to go through the motions. So once again I reflect bitterly on the massive arrogance of having any pride at all.

This time around, I am preloading some of next time's bitterness, knowing that I will forget these key learnings in time and let my pride grow out of control once more. It is human nature, and for all my rebellion, all my aspiration to better, ecce homo. There is no escape but death.

*

The following are my own personal truths that should always be rolling around in my pocket, waiting to be grasped whenever and always. To repeat myself, that I ever let them go is a testament to my ability to let myself down consistently and with aplomb. 

• the illusion of control brings only needless pain
• the illusion of knowledge brings only false pride
• the illusions of good and evil are the foundations of hell upon this earth
• beyond good and evil, beyond knowledge, is the infinite universe, which is the only truth, and it is meaningless.

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There is no point where one has suffered enough. There is no point where one has learned enough. There is no enough, no progress, no goal. There are no points at all. No point in, to, or about anything whatever.

Only the infinite. 

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I point you to the unbelievable weight of the time that has passed and all that it was witnessed, more than even the absurdly overclocked little meat computers thrumming beneath our dura mater could ever properly conceive of or hold or process. Then, to the infinitely larger and infinitely the same amount of time that has yet to transpire, which could be so large as to crush our time multiplied by itself, rendering ten trillion years a paper-thin layer at the base of ten million layers that composes one layer of a sedimentary strata that is the visualization of part of a section of a moment in infinite time. 

And it could all repeat infinitely, even though it never ends.

*

It's all a joke, and all the time you are forgetting to laugh, it is on you.

--JL