#493

I am extremely happy in my room. My room is a place that fills up steadily with works of art that please me in their execution and completion. The walls are green in here. I have Pokémon stickers and pictures of birds and animals and landscapes scavenged from a number of those paper calendars nature conservancy societies send people all over. The carpet is shitty, but who cares about that. Just means no need for stress about getting paint on it.

Frankly, it's so good that leaving my room is something of an imposition under any given circumstance, but when I am forced to, at least I am still in my house, which is another place I am extremely happy. The house has improved immensely since we moved in, both aesthetically and in terms of functioning elements. The real issues begin when I have to leave the house, but that's more psychological than anything to do with any real problems out there, except bright headlights, poisoned air, and maniacs with easy access to a variety of killing machines (including that two-ton missile attached to each set of those hellaciously bright headlamps).

Every biosphere has its hazards, and each of its residents must deal with their multitudes in their due portion. So it goes.

*

There was a serious fuckton of law enforcement on my street today; yea, right up close to two houses down. Also the house directly across the street. State police, local city, sherriff, and even a car from a different city. Plus a few city trucks and an unmarked white van. Wuuuuut? Nobody liked that.

Pretty much missed what it was all about, though I did infer that it was two separate municipal tasks rolled into one so as to facilitate the whole process; a more complete show of force benefiting both. That's all the commentary I have, I guess, except that there is simply no way for a reasonable person to feel at ease of any kind of with the amount of firepower represented by those vehicles in proximity.

Moments like that--though to be fair I have been thinking about this a lot recently apropos of nothing--one really meditates on how purely symbolic the shelter one is provided with at my economic strata. If anything went wrong on my street and bullets started flying, any one slug could pass through probably up to three houses, maybe a lot more, maybe less depending the caliber and what might impede one. You would not have to ransack the black market to secure rounds which could easily pass through my wall, me, my back wall, my back neighbor's wall, and still hit my neighbor. Because our walls are, for all intents and purposes, made of paper. I can throw a baseball into one and it will stick. Maybe fully knock a hole. I don't really know how hard I can throw a baseball, but I am confident it would stick.

Like I was saying before. Maniacs, of all levels and descriptions, are a serious problem in this environment, all the more so due to their access to tools designed to do nothing but kill as efficiently as possible, and their propensity to cut corners until there is nothing but a dirty knife.

*

Anyway, I like my house and I like my neighborhood but it could all be more durable and sustainable and set in a much, much better society, as far as I can assess. That is the breakdown. You might say that I am wrong to criticize a society as the beneficiary of its mechanisms, and it may be so to a certain extent, but identical as well as superior formats could exist under a wide variety of such sets and norms as call themselves societies, so I don't see why I shouldn't ask for better. 

As a tax-paying citizen under the terms of our particular constitutions and parameters, asking for better, it was always my understanding, was to be the whole point.

Noplace was ever the kingdom of heaven merely because people declared it to be so. 

*

Events even more current and specific, yet sociopolitical commentary even more abstract. Hopefully by next post I will be fully buried in my navel once again, and the world will not present as even so much as a dull roar. It is not really my place to be useful here. The blog is not "the news" or "useful opinions". The blog is "factually pointless". This is how it should be.

Till then, dear reader. My task these days is to find a way to generate income and maintain sanity. Simple things, maybe, but my ability to rise to them by no means certain. Faith and hope! Courage, and to screw it to the sticking-place! That's all we got.

--JL

#492

Well, it's almost two months into the year. Interesting year so far. Eventful! Personally and on a global scale.

Yes, a post about current events. Perhaps they are to some degree inevitable. Feel free to check out and slide away to more rewarding internet locales. I would. But it would perhaps be unwise, if I am able to offer any kind of useful insight. And maybe I can. That's why I bother to type it out and put it where people can see it, I guess, even if no one looks. Even if people did look, and it caused problems for me, I would still do it. 

Everything, of course, is to some degree inevitable. Arguing about it won't change that.

*

Well, look. I know that Americans reading this, generational Americans specifically, might think they still have a country. Shit, this country technically did survive Andrew Jackson and Warren Harding, two points in history in which the executive was overrun with trolls, gangsters, and petty thieves, and that's not nothing.

The country was much younger and the world much older in both instances. Young organisms are in key ways more resilient than their mature counterparts, and the world has been made anew five or perhaps eight times over since 1923.

But factually we probably don't have a country left. Every 24-hour period makes it less probable that we will be able to return to democratic norms. That's how it works in other countries, and if this past decade and a half has proved anything, anything, it is that the United States is no mythical example, no blessed fluke, no modern utopia, no nothing in any way special. Just another country full of humans.  

If things continue as they have been, then they could very easily just replace the courts with implacable algorithms and congress with a consumer panel overseen by a board of directors. 

Naturally nothing these bodies produce will have any effect on the CEO. That position can and only could ever be decided internally, using machinations whose inputs are completely severed from the public sensorium and indeed, reality. 

Once it has happened, you will see that such has always been their dark vision. They would never have said so! But it will be extremely obvious in retrospect, when you review the lies they told vs. the actions they took, that having a government was never really the plan. 

*

As I have said before, and as was quickly made manifest--they can just deport people wherever the fuck they want. They can make it happen by making it legal by being--it is very simple--bullies. They get it. They have always been bullies and they understand that being a bully works just as well when it's countries and laws as when it's toys and rules.

The reason for having governments is to prevent bullies from ruling the roost. Goverment fails when the bullies are in charge. It is...pretty simple.

*

"They" in this whole screed, by the way, should be understood as the brigands and profiteers whose aim is open and omnivorous theft of the highest possible magnitude, breadth, and scope, as well as any and all ideological maniacs who wish to vent their fear-based genocidal urges. 

As is so often true, the above are entwined in a very profitable and pleasurable position. Indeed, the former have historically found it useful and expedient to maintain in every way they can the conditions to create as much genocidal fear as possible--to embed it deeply in as many subcultures and across language and law and moral commandment. This trick has been key in accelerated forms of societal formation and collapse.

Building slave empires on foundations of total nonsense and thus creating the conditions for their own dissolution. Toppling monarchies with populist movements only to install a regime more brutal than previously thought tolerable or even possible. Coming in to gut existing companies and flying away on a helicopter with all their money. And so forth. That is the basic game.

People do it to themselves and allow it to be done to them. It is hard to hope for change when you see how willing and eager we are to spill the same innocent blood over and over and over again for completely made-up reasons each and every time. Always to the sound of applause, at first.

And believe me--there is always money in it.

*

All the truly useful solutions lie in the realm of fantasy. Such as: if I could magically give these people what they wanted without the human cost involved.

Do you understand? If I could just give these crazy fucking quasi-religious fanatics and twisted race scientists what they were after--a society comprised only of their described acceptable monoculture, inviolable and pure and legitimate in its closed-border holdings, by magically, intstantly withdrawing everyone they would like to fucking murder to a safe location, then I would.

Why? Because they wouldn't know what to fucking do. They would fucking starve. Those fortunate enough to survive the riots and outbreaks of disease, anyway. These people have no fucking clue what they're really after. They don't remember or realize that if there's no one around to be their slaves, then eventually, someone's going to have to lift a finger.

Who cleans the human feces? Who grows the food and deals with it and cooks it? Who gets to sit around all god damned day and point fingers? These questions have answers that they like, for now. What happens when suddenly the basis for those answers is completely gone?

It would even be immoral. To give them what they want. Wouldn't even want to watch that gruesome farce play out. Like the martyred socialist said, they know not what they do. They understand nothing. And to reveal to them the magnitude of their ignorance in this way would be cruel.

But it would probably be better than letting them kill us.

*

Letting them kill us seems to be the plan, as far as I can see. Very Christian of us and I approve, in a sense. I would also like to die later, from other causes, but no one gets to pick how they go, except all those who do. We say they are bad, I guess, but you know what I think about what "we" say en masse without thinking deeply about it.

Who fucking cares. Ballot, bullet, bullshit. It'll all kill you. Don't have any better plan and even if I did, don't know of anyone more socially dead than myself. Might be cool if someone had a strategy and I could trust it. Not from where I'm looking.

But I am seeing something I have seen before: a united and determined political minority has bamboozled the agitated public into giving them the government, and the political majority is too fragmented, inflexible, and fundamentally ineffective to stop them or do anything at all useful, really--just the same ritual genuflections that have been failing thus far, their power drained as though founded on a dead god.

*

So that's the pessimism. Do we have another angle?

Well, another fun fantasy is like, just being able to change someone's mind. Like, if I could, I dunno, concentrate real hard and pull my left earlobe while snapping my fingers and just watch someone let go their fear and their hate and their anger. That would be one fucking hell of a superpower. Better than Superman; fight me.

But, no. No, I don't really have much optimism. Only that this wretched world is visible to us, limited creatures that we are, as through a glass darkly, and to be freed from its bounds and sound what has been hidden will be to see and know one another and this world as it truly was, as we truly have been, as we are and will be, and faith that this veil is drawn over a perfect universe beyond my microscopic and human-all-too-human comprehension. 

In a good way. Guess that's my optimism. We are small, the present brief. Soon all this mess and tension will be of little consequence to whomsoever might walk this weary globe in another thousand thousand years. 

*

Thinking of finding a big giant jar to live in. Could be fun. Could be a novel career move after all this shit burns down around me, if I'm not shot to death in the street or put on a work crew in Nicaragua or wherever the fuck.

--JL

#491

It's been difficult to write; not for lack of time and not because my brain has not been writing but because turning creative energy towards the physical act has largely resulted in painting and painting-related duties, like duct taping together a big cardboard cross so I can paint it and make some kind of sculpture of Christ to put on it as is my heraldric right and, for some idiot yet fundamental reason, my spiritual task.

Painting--really, working with pigment and other media, as I use a lot of different stuff--is more immediately helpful with the kind of psychic distress I am enduring. Words feel like a hard pull. Got a good flow going with the painting and the drawing and stuff.

*

Those words were ok, cuz they were about painting. But what now? Maybe I should write about my painting thoughts.

But I'm a fucking writer, guys. I write the word thoughts already. Everything else has to go through its own proper channels. Playing music, painting--these are not really word thoughts things to engage in for me. Describing what it is only goes so far.

Just feels good to put the color down and make the lines and shapes. What else is there? The mind goes to a place.

--JL

#490

Wow man. Even in the understanding that life is a saga and every day it adds to itself another entire page full of interminable details, each one advancing the plot equally--life comes at you fast. 

My little sister lived for all of forty-seven seconds. Suppose I misremember the precise amount of them. Confident that it was less than a minute.

Confident it was fewer seconds than I got.

This has always seemed like a fully insane juxtaposition, and it has only grown more maddening with the passing of the years. A burden. In manifold ways. That void, which should have been occupied. That silence wherein a voice should have sounded.

But there are no should haves. Only what is. 

*

Wow man. What the fuck makes me bring that up? Have I ever? Might suppose it's something the average reader deserves to know about me, maybe, before I hit 500 posts and/or stop forever. It's also something they will get to know about my whole family, but them's the fuckin breaks, I guess. My family is by no means unique in this experience.

*

The real "wow man" is that I lost my job, so I don't have a job again. Feels bad actually. I don't like that this has happened, or that I am in this situation.

b U t  T h E m ' S  t H e  F u C k I n   B r E a K s and plus it is my own fault. Couldn't hold it together. Had to quit, no fallback no plan. It's just me. It's how I can be, when I am how I am.

One for the "FIAL" column.

*

Guess what makes me bring it up is kind of this feeling like staring down the barrel of a gun. This feeling, one of utter finality, brings about a certain feeling of closeness with my sister. What can be fucking said about that, eh?

Fuck-all. 

*

But. It is only a feeling, despite its many reasonable foundations. 

For now, I am alive, and there is hope. There is still a lot of life to live, if I can keep getting just through this next day, as I have scraped along thus far.

And been grateful. Been joyful. Made sure it was worth it. 

There is at least that.

*

Maybe now is the time to start a youtube channel. Or a fight club. Or foster at-risk teens. Or found an academy modeled after the pursuit of Hesse's Glass Bead Game from Magister Ludi, or, The Glass Bead Game.

*

Or claim myself as a religion and that my religion demands that I stay on my own property five days out of the week, and that Jesus demands that I read and produce words and take images in through the eyes as well as craft my own, as a form of universe-sustaining worship twelve hours five days a week and three hours the other two--one of His Didactic Instruments, and a busy one at that!

You see, I have noticed how even far more immoderate ideas than that get people tax-exempt status and all sorts of other goodies. Maybe it is time to leverage this prodoundly idiotic system for my own tiny benefit. 

*

Probably not, but maybe? It kind of seems like a time in American history where maybe it's fair to try any number of new things and hope you don't get fucking murdered.

Peace, Love, Try Not to Die

--JL

#489

Oh No! Forgot last post was supposed to be list day! List day for my precious, precious readers, to whom I gave solid assurances!

You poor things, to be such worms on my hook. 

There, there. I have arrived, with more lists that you could ever have bargained for.

*

Maybe that's a bold claim, maybe I'm here to wreck all your concepts. Guess we find out together.

*

video games I have completed lately:

Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII: Reunion (this has to be one of my favorite games ever. I am not kidding. I know a lot of people take issue with a lot of things about it, maybe the PSP version was worse [I think maybe I got to hold a PSP once. Once] but I think it is a masterpiece. Activate my combat mode, bb)

Final Fantasy IV (somehow it just never gets old! I love this stupid story so fucking much)

video games I have started lately but not yet completed:

Final Fantasy XIII (finally! finally. And you know what? Feels good. It really is an amazingly fun game to play. Faults it has, and they vary in gravity from personality to personality, but the game is so great to play and so amazing to look at, and the story is a remarkable thing remarkably told. Playing a bunch of its predecessors in succession has, as I hoped, help me see it in a new light and raised in in my estimation from "fifty percent genius lashed to a pain machine" to "compromised yet sacred vision". This is probably the nex game I will beat, unless it is...)

Final Fantasy V (getting to be pretty close to done with this bad boy--and it was so rad! That sexy, sexy job system. Another bonkers, silly-ass, beautiful, magnificent tale. Music's not as good as IV or VI, but that's ok. The maps are also iconic.)

INSIDE (almost exactly halfway, kinda stuck on some part of a puzzle that as I type this, makes me unsure that it's a puzzle...I should probably fire it up and try something new right now...anyway INSIDE is very very very good, I have a perception that everybody knows that already and they are right)

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (taking my sweet time with this one. It's just that, from the moment it started, I didn't want it to be over)

Final Fantasy VI (really liking it, but I'm at the first juncture where the party gets big and then they split it--like in XIII!--and I took a break there)

video games I particularly wish I could play, but can't right now due to reality:

Final Fantasy VII: Remake+Intergrade

Elden Ring

video games whose soundtracks I have been obsessed with/were FINALLY made available

All Final Fantasy games, to varying degrees, the intensity of it might actually be a little embarassing

Eastward (FINALLY FINALLY THE SHEER PLEASURE OF IT)

Kingdom Hearts II

Golden Sun

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild+Skyward Sword

albums I have listened to lately from start to finish for the first time

Soul Supreme | Soul Supreme

#KingButch | Butcher Brown

Zelda: The Themes on Piano | Arcade Player

As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again | The Decemberists

Fractures+Folding+Flight of the Sparrow | Anderholm

200Xad | Mega Drive

Atom Heart Mother | HARU NEMURI

(Per la) via di casa | La rappresentante di lista

Reaching Fourth | McCoy Tyner Trio

Today and Tomorrow | McCoy Tyner

Plays Pretty | Oscar Peterson

Riverside Profiles: Thelonius Monk

Takin' Off (Expanded Edition) | Herbie Hancock

GUNSHIP (Instrumentals) | GUNSHIP

Syndicate Shadow | Neon Nox

Nocturn | Tonebox

Athletic Progression | Athletic Progression

Vince Guaraldi Trio | Vince Guaraldi Trio

Black Classical Music | Yussef Dayes

Quarantine Sessions | Tom Misch

What Kinda Music | Tom Misch and Yussef Dayes

Quarantena | Tenderlonius

Keys To The City Volume One+Black Radio III (Supreme Edition)+Code Derivation | Robert Glasper

BREAD | Sofi Tukker

A01 | OLDUCT

Symphonie Pacifique | Greg Foat

Black Focus | Yussef Kamaal

Think of One...+Black Codes (From the Underground) | Wynton Marsalis

movies I have watched lately

The Batman

The Boy and the Heron 

Namoo

television programs I have watched some or all of recently, some ongoing

Severance

Adventure Time+Distant Lands+Fionna and Cake (rewatch)

documentaries I have watched recently

Chimp Crazy

The Way Down: God, Greed, and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin

Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God

(this is kind of a morbid viewing pattern but I guess I just want to understand these types of mindset better)

comics I have read recently

Vattu+Rice Boy+Order of Tales+3rd Voice | Evan Dahm (reread what I had covered then finished Vattu after a couple years away, which allowed time for a complete and a delicious backlog of 3rd Voice to accumulate--this website is among internet's absolute foremost, and has been since Rice Boy's very first strip--reread that and Order of Tales)

Demon's Mirror | Harry Bogosian

Skin Deep | Kory Bing (reread, catchup)

Octopus Pie | Meredith Gran (reread, but there was also a post-covid story I hadn't read yet with [spoiler] some weddings in it)

Buttercup Festival | David Troupes (reread, catchup)

comics I am about to begin and catch up with because I am just now finding out they exist because one misses these things sometimes and just has to live with the pain and fatality of that knowledge

Blikada | C. Spike Trotman

*

It is reasonable to ask how I accomplish such a media diet along with sustaining life and keeping house and meeting any number of other temporal demands. In the first place, I am dedicated. Some would say, obsessed to the point of self-sabotage. For I think of myself as a fairly efficient manager of my days and times in certain senses, depending of course on the day and season, and it bears out in terms of how much I get done. The obverse, of course, is what I basically never get done, what I end up crushing into the last minute, the sacrifices and excisions of other activities necessary in order to pursue my many, errant threads. 

But we are all weavers, eh? This is my tapestry, and I put it together my way.

*

Guess that wasn't too crazy on the list front. Well, keep an eye out. I don't know what happens next either.

--JL

#488

It's funny--there's no real need to report this fact--but today's Pnnies Arkhad comical strip has a huge amount in common with the very first joke ever told in the strip, and it was still pretty funny and like, fine. An arguably objective comedic and artistic improvement over a linear span of time, and it didn't make me feel like I was choking down abject hackery! Think this shows Jim Davis did a high-acumen assessment of the medium when he said it's okay to literally repeat your own jokes after ten years.

*

Guys, I should probably mention that typing has become weird and much more typo-driven since one of the cats ripped my "E" key right off the board once when I was unwisely prising her off her chosen sleep surface. Well, I wanted to fucking write, dammit, was indeed in the middle of writing and she was making deep and penetrating editorial changes--but one ought to know better than to mess with the household god that way. The slapdown was swift, and of course, ironic.

Anyway typing isn't as fun now. Hasn't been. Need a new computer, or maybe a professional tablet. Something with an "E" key. Lived this stunted life for months now. Think this incident happened in maybe October.

Something about writing in English, Singaporean bots that comprise my new readership: the letter "E" is vital to the easy use of the language. One would not be wrong in saying it is the most important and common vowel; indeed, it is provable fact.

*

Jim Davis is the Garfield guy, in case that information has faded in the dead orange glow and sheer scale of that feline monument.

*

Non-seq! Nintendo, you are never going to get the respect you deserve if your wonderful and constantly-growing music app doesn't work as well as other music apps. I can blame Apple for this if you need me to, though. If that were justified, I would not be the least little bit surprised.

Of course, Apple's music player is the one I like--and it could also work better on their own hardware. Maybe it's kind of a hard job?

All right, guys. Maybe I'll cut you some slack. Though if anybody that works at you ever tells me it was super easy and it was all just boardroom shenanigans harming the product and adversely affecting the consumer and their investment, I still won't be surprised. 

Guess the main issue at hand isn't whether I'm surprised. Maybe we should concentrate on everything I pay money for working perfectly every time I go to use it or all my money back for the month. How's that for a fucking suggestion box slip, you silent monoliths?

I'm looking at all of you. Maybe glaring is a better word. Glaring up, up, from the garbage-strewn canyons where my kind make their trammeled living, up to the great carven faces, the ozymandic golden idols whose slow, titanic motions reverberate through the wearied materials of this shambling, already-dead world and wrack it ever more spasmodically as it crumbles into the sands of time.

*

So, what's up with everybody? Seen any good movies lately?

Perhaps that's entirely smarmy now that I work at a movie theater. That's what I'm up to later, by the way. Think there's some kind of event to host.

Peace the FUCK OUT

--JL

#487

Man, I never thought I would say this, or anything like this, but I went to a gentleman's club yesterday night for the first time in my life, all by myself, and I had a nice time. Honestly it felt empowering in a feminist way, like, you know what, girl? Yes. Take my money, which I cannot afford to give you. This is a form of justice, and I'm ready to admit that. 

Either I misapprehended the ritual due to the distance I've maintained from it, or I simply had good luck plus my local place isn't some thrice-haunted slimehole. This fact means that I really can't afford to go very often at all--three times a year? If I'm really into it? The whole thing is a luxury experience, I have learned; like, I'm glad I had a nice button-down on, and it would really represent a badly sunk investment if one had a bad night; ruined by those unfit to call themselves gentlemen is primarily my concern. Certainly couldn't afford such a thing as a private room this time or basically ever. Next time I have zero debt and I own everything I own and I have more than a thousand dollars in the bank, I'll consider socking away the price of a private room. Good luck to me on that front. Signs point to fucking never.

But yeah. Told 'em up front it was my first time, asked for and got a rundown on etiquette and do's and dont's, learned the price of most things (the hidden charges must be seen as the price of admission and did not surprise me, but still), all very chill. The place smelled fresh and ventilated, which was really my main thing.

There were two girls on--Monday night, you know, place was just me and the one dude in there when I arrived, he left after awhile, I left a little after two other guys came in later.

This is one of those junctures where it would be easy to use ugly and misogynist language to dscribe kind of what was going on with staffing choices and how to work an entertainment space and serve the public--all dimensions I am acutely aware of as a professional and as a consumer--but it is just as apt to use much different words and ideas. The short and brutal, old-school way to describe it is they had a thoroughbred and a workhorse playing each to their strengths. The better way to formulate it is they had a professional exemplifying standards of rare physical perfection, performance expertise, and working near-silence and air of unavailable mystique (amplified wholly by copious tattoos from calf to neck), and another professional exemplifying hospitality, warmth, welcoming, relaxing the vibe, and putting all comers more physically at ease with a body more rubenesque, soft, and celebratory of physical flaws. The latter was my first on-the-clock stripper experience, and she made me feel at home very quickly--a talent not everyone possesses!

The funny way to say it is that they had the insanely hot girl who cut herself a lot but you really have to know how to see that, and the English major. Probably shouldn't say that.

When I say insanely hot, sadly, I mean that she was too beautiful, so beautiful that it messes up people and society. She even had short hair, a winning choice in my estimation. I been with a lot of beautiful people of all shapes and sizes, some so beautiful that I sort of expected to wake up at any second. She was perhaps the equal or superior of all comers in every respect, so the optimal dancer for my sequential life experience, I guess--I really didn't think it was possible to see something that remarkable on a Monday night. But there was an element of the pain of the reality of things underneath the fantasy she made so sublime.

Both of these women took amazing care of me and got a lot of my money, and I would like to celebrate that. They were gorgeous in every respect, and I honor their heart and their talent and their labor on my behalf. It was a pleasure to act as a gentleman before them, and to enjoy their company and craft.

 *

Beauty. Seen people destroyed by the beauty of another, which is sad but preventable and like, hm. I get it and it can even have a comedic streak, however dark the material. Yet to see people destroyed by their own beauty--that is merely tragic. 

Sometimes, when the world is done and the beauty it wanted is used up and irretreivable, there is nothing left, or close enough to nothing that the rest of the story is the most futile of epilogues. There's no good joke there that I can find. 

*

Beauty. Suppose I can rap this way, or want to, because I was born with a ravenous love for the stuff, an eye starved constantly for beauty, and because by chance I have beautiful parents who bestowed upon me a beauty of my own, just such one of those beauties the world gets weird around. 

Speaking as only a human can speak to other humans, human beings are uniquely beautiful. And when my eye, lover of beauty that it is, looks upon the world of humans, very few in general seem ugly to me, and it is my belief that the ugliness I am seeing is not of the body, but psychic and spiritual ugliness deforming the aspect of the physical. Roald Dahl talks about this in his little book The Twits--maybe this is the kind of occasion to even see if I can dig out a .jpeg I like to keep around to show folks.

copyrights, copyrights, mumbo-jumbo.  Does any of that shit still apply? Hasn't all human achievement been stolen, twice? Who gives a shit anymore. Roald Dahl's words, Quentin Blake's drawings. Mr. Dahl is dead, Mr. Blake draws on as of today.

Anyway!

Still and all, for reasons difficult to identify, some physiques are beautiful in a transcendental way, some faces composed in such a way as to alter reality. Some people have such beautiful eyes it is difficult to make and especially maintain eye contact. Some of these beauties are so total they remain alluring even when they house terrible thoughts and nothing but pain and boiling vengeance. 

It is a strange world, and the surface of things, beautiful though they are, remain nothing more than surfaces; as significant, as durable, and as real as the surface of a pond. The surface--the least pondlike part of the pond--the least real part of anything. Just a membrane, shifting from second to second.

Temporary, even fleeting; like all things, like everything else, like even this ancient, newborn universe.

*

Hey hey what what! Man, still can't believe I went to a strip club. Never in my life! 

My mom's voice and visage as it exists perpetually in my psyche, joined over time by other disapproving, judgmental women with their arms crossed who I have allowed to live in there, have all worked extremely, extremely hard to prevent this and are all very disppointed, trying to make me feel guilt about money and the whole rest of it, believe me--but I think they are wrong, despite my great esteem and love for them. It feels important to realize that they kind of have to be, in some fundamental ways.

*

Ok, ok. Lists tomorrow, rest assured. I know. Got you all salivating down your front like a little baby for some lists and then I pull some shit like this. Now your balls are bluer than a mandrill's face. 

Sorry to hurt you.

Once a girl told me that she had no choice but to masturbate because she'd been so wet and engorged for so long that it caused physical pain.

Sorry to hurt you.

--JL

*we were sexting. On farcebark messenger. A mistake of youth. If I ever piss off that mandroid or anyone working for that hideous obelisk, they're gonna embarass me badly. With a lot of collateral damage I guess, though it would be good if they could avoid that part. But I've said some real mean things about Meta over the years. Sometimes your opponent knows the best way to hurt you is through others, and God help those others if it's the only way.

Fuck you guys, though. I am not afraid of any of you. Computer nerds. Fucking losers.