#88

I'll be back after the New Year! I should have mentioned that. I don't feel like making any more blog posts this year. I'll write the first post of the year of our Lord two thousand and nineteen on New Year's Day. Hopefully I'll generate something marginally worth the effort required to read it.

I have had my fill of 2018! This was a really difficult year to survive, but I think I learned a huge amount. Wretched and incredible. So it goes! Upward and onward! If you look back, you die! If you give in to fear, you grow old! Step forward, forward, ever forward!

Enjoy your holidays.


--JL

#87

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve! It's just possible that you might not have known that and missed it, or forgotten what day it was entirely, or some such trouble. Then it would be on my conscience. I am happy to remind you.

*

Christmas is a pretty good time of year. I have never experienced any of these nightmare Christmases so celebrated and aggrandized in the wider culture, nor have I ever felt the approach of yuletide as a groaning doom which my shoulders must bleed under once every year. I know a lot of people really do, and the omnipresence of Christmas is torture, a torture whose chronoterritory expands yearly, like a holly, jolly cancer eating the calendar.

Deplorable as the mass hypercommercialization of Christmas is, and despite the trauma, inseparable from the holiday which afflicts so many, Christmas is a net good. I have been known to speak in a voice progressively more thick with rage to the point of actual spit coming out of my mouth as I talk about it all; the hypocrisy, the greed, the avarice, the out-of-control acquisitiveness. The holiday as it is marketed and often expressed is a twisted nightmare inverse of its rooted intentions: spiritual and physical rebirth, honor and charity for the humble and the meek, breaking bread with loved ones, the rising of the sun and other stars--renewal, sustenance, the promise of ascension.

These are necessary things to act out, even if it's all cocked up practically beyond recognition, even if mostly it's awful. It's because it's taking a shot at it. Taking a shot at it is the only way to get it right even once. Feeling that feeling even once is worth it. Worth it all. Pays for itself and everything else.

The only way to get anything--anything-- out of life is to believe in something that's not real, and making it happen, making it true. Believing in real shit is comparatively easy, still complicated, but easier. The other thing's a little harder, but it makes the real more real and the unreal more real than that, which I believe is sublime. And as human beings, we need an agreed-upon time, a significant time, to remind ourselves of that, to remind each other.

It is possible to let go of what has been, to embrace what is, to become prepared and willing and able to love more than before, give more than before, rejoice more than before, more than ever in your life, in ways you barely dared imagine and some you couldn't have. 

Truly, it is something which will hold you through the year. Truly, it is not about the single day, but what that day can, through the laughably simple spell of belief and love, kindle in your spirit--the transfigurations that begin as tiny moments of love and grow great within us, sustaining and bolstering us, if we are lucky, till next Christmas.

Have a merry holiday, dear readers. Season's blessings upon all of you, and all those you love. May peace reign supreme over a healing world.


--JL

#86

Read a book by Terry Pratchett! It had been a very long time. I read a few at a formative age, but I guess Kurt Vonnegut sort of took over that conceptual reading space. If I had to pick a culprit. The truth is I read one I didn't much care for, thought I'd have a break, and never thought to return. But this one, Hogfather, was both excellent--truly, magnificent and pretty much genius--and seasonally appropriate. 

Before that, I had quite abandoned Susan Sontag, carried away as has been my wont since age eight by Madeleine L'Engle's incredible powers. We all have a literary mother. My Mother brought me the Time Quartet after a trip back to the U.S., and put them in my hands, saying she had a feeling I would like them. It really was a feeling, too. She knew nothing whatsoever about them, had never heard of them, saw them on the shelf while looking for a gift for me and felt those would be good, not only good, but Good. Moms, man. I thanked her, privately feeling that she was almost ridiculously and perhaps even mockingly mistaken; the books looked weird, and also soft in some way beyond the pastel palettes and gentle linework of the covers. They were shelved and went unread for some months, but I read at such a pace in those days that they were all I had uncracked, and thus I deigned to read the first sentence of Wrinkle, which, (famously) of all the possible sentences in the wide, wide world of sports, went "It was a dark and stormy night." 

That second sentence, though. Immediately assuages any sense of betrayal. From there, relentlessly, it's nothing but one of the finest artistic achievements ever, straight-up one of the best books of all time. All of them are. I weep to read them. Nakedly, messily, ecstatically, sorrow breaking me open and joy tearing me apart.

*

You know what? That opening line still kills and I'm never really mad to see it. Charles Schultz used it all the time and it was always good. Just, when I was a little kid, I was for real considerably snobbier than I am now. Pretty embarrassing. Reading a lot is my main thing and and on that turf, I could be unkind. Have been unkind. Could still be unkind, if cornered. Tigers, leopards, spots and stripes, scorpions and their stingers, you know.

For example: don't ever try to have an argument with me about a book you haven't read, or bring a book you haven't read into a argument. I'll find you out quick--I make it a point to admit outright if I have not read a book, since anyone who tries to make you feel bad for not reading a book is straight-up bullying you and I don't give a fuck what bullies think of me--I will call you out on the spot, and I won't let you walk away feeling good about yourself. I don't care about what you haven't read at all, I don't care if you don't read stop signs, but pulling that shit is the stuff of cravens, jackasses, and again, bullies.

It can never be said enough: all that a bully is good for is being defeated. It is up to everyone else to grow strong enough to defeat bullies, and if necessary, strong enough to protect, help, and support those who for some reason or another are particularly vulnerable to bullies. In addition, bullies come in all shapes and forms, and everyone has it in them to protect someone from some bully in a way best conferred to their own suite of talents and abilities--some bullies are even thus engaged, for life is rarely as simple, cut, and dried as we like to declaim. Support systems and coping mechanisms; complex, layered. 

However, bullies are always welcome to get their miserable lives right, and until then, all they deserve is defeat, frustration, and the obdurate, mute hatred of the universe.

What they generally get is something else. 

I've always had a strong personal sense that everything shakes out in the end, though; even, in unseen ways, minute by minute and hour and by hour. Imbalance is part of a larger balance and all that. Inborn subjective comforts are a lucky thing, existence-wise. Bolstered, if you are lucky, by exceptional books.

Good night!


--JL

#85

Pictures are worth a thousand words; this is an exchange rate little-debated, and I am not going to debate it now. I even think we are perhaps underselling most pictures. Most who dabble primarily in words but use them to write about art (ill-minded folk, difficult to trust) tend to generate about fifty thousand words per picture, creating five corollary picture's worth of interpretation and as though to fence it in and keep it tame, as though such action does not generate tracks that can be followed. Nonsense! You can't fight pictures. We all trade in pictures. And pictures always speak for themselves, and tell the truth about themselves no matter what you say.

Walks, however, are worth approximately, depending on the length and conditions, worth a hundred thousand to ten million pictures. No proper walk could ever really be described in words, just as the best pictures still the very speaking qualities of the mind, so that words come filtering up to one's consciousness as though struggling from great depths into sunlit shallows, one by one, before normal thought engages and grinds back into motion. 

Words are made up of abstract symbols, though, and the symbol is the little object, the tiny sign which casts a shadow over the whole universe. Words stop making sense, pictures fade, but symbols--symbols go on and on and on. 

When the word breaks the surface of the water to sail into the air, the whole world can spin on the power of that moment, can balance on its sharpness. The whole picture, visible all at once, in the smallest sign.


--JL

#84

Got a lot of page views yesterday! Weird. I don't even remember what I talked about, and I just went to reread it a couple minutes ago to figure out why it had more hits! Who knows. I don't think about that stuff too much. It would be nice to sell more of my books, but I'm not too stressed about that either. I would prefer my day job paid better to making enough at this to quit it. I have many vocations, and it makes sense that the most physically demanding and societally beneficial through direct action be the one that generates my actual living revenue*. I'll take money for making art because it costs money and calories (which cost money and calories) to make it and money to distribute it, but I don't need to have nothing to do but art. Maybe when I'm eighty-five or something.

*

Here, I'm going to try plugging my books a bit better. I'll say some stuff about my book of short stories, Symphonic Minor Heresies: Movement #1. 

Well, it's full of little jokes. If you think I'm funny, you'll like 'em. Some of them are very sneaky.

I took the cover photo myself!

The book has quite a few stories for its length, as many are quite short. They cover a lot of different things in a lot of different styles, so if you don't like some of the stuff you might like some of the rest. Your friends might feel differently. I have never been a member of a book club, but I sense this might be a good book for the right kind of book club.

It can be taken very seriously or enjoyed merely for the pleasure of its play.

That's all I feel like saying! 


--JL

*cooking. I am a cook. 

#83

I have no business picking up any new books at all; therefore, I have managed to only collect about fourteen or sixteen new ones over the last three months. I am a sick man. I know I have a problem, but it's a compulsion. Like the typing and the scribbling, sometimes I have to go get some books and add them to the ones I have. Have to. 

I got Lattimore's translation of The Odyssey, Oxford's Author's collection of Jonathan Swift, and a little book of Robert Bly's poems. That was actually yesterday. A lot of stuff happened today, but I don't feel like writing about it. Or anything else, 'cause I'm beat! Peace.


--JL

#82

Damn! That was a dense couple of days. Dense with events! Feels like such a long time to me! Remember my teeth? Good times. Scroll down, if you didn't read about my teeth before. It's totally good information. If you're reading the archive, future reader, you just read it; but, maybe you can scroll back down, give yourself a quick refresher on my teeth. If you feel like you need to. I heard the test is supposed to be pretty easy.

*

This evening was glorified outrageously by among the most spectacular sunsets I have ever borne witness to. The sky's movement into twilight stands in total defiance of any description, and joins the ranks of celestial vistas that define my life and whose ghosts I sometimes attempt to translate into readable form, long after the fact.

*

Indeed, my life is in great part defined by the skies I have seen. They are etched into an inviolable place within me.

*

Back to work! Ha, no, so what happened is I walked to work a surprise double, walked home, walked in the next day, worked, walked home to shower, allowed a get-together to rob me of much psychic energy and sleep to boot, walked in today, worked, walked around a bunch after my shift, then walked home. I'm a little beat! And I work the next two mornings! I am going to go to sleep! 

As soon as my clothes come out of the dryer. 

Peace out, brothers, sisters, and siblings of other identities! Merry Christmas and every other holiday or anti-holiday anybody cares to name! Even if it's something I find objectionable or repellent, have a merry time of it. I take that goodwill on earth towards all mankind shit serious. 


--JL

#81

Never had a cavity, I say with that insufferable pride unique to motherfuckers who don't get cavities. Well, what else can I say? Now, even if I did get a cavity, I wouldn't get a filling, because I just don't trust the dentist. I also avoid the doctor. I ignore their advice pretty often, also, basically whenever it contradicts my instincts and knowledge. I instituted this policy five years ago, and my health has, by and large, been excellent, much better than when I visited both regularly and depended on them to do my thinking for me.

A German company makes wooden toothbrushes with hair from special German pigs. Dr. Tung makes a pretty good floss; anything that isn't that thin worthless horseshit Oral-B makes. There are flosses available that are thick and luxuriant, some using silk, some merely essential oils. It's that thickness that you're looking for, that rope. No flat string. I like this fancy French Ayurvedic toothpaste, Tom's of Maine has improved tremendously, but even Colgate and Crest or even just water baking soda is okay, as long as you're brushing and flossing every day. They're right about that part. 

I was born with a propensity to pick at myself, at scabs and scars and blemishes and bites, and still I deal with that, but screwing around with my baby teeth was even better. I really miss having teeth I could afford to, was even supposed to lose. I really miss interacting with loose teeth. On occasion I'll have taken a hit to the mouth that sort of gently unseats a tooth in its socket, but I leave it be through force of will and it heals up. Was a time I woke up bored, went to a mirror, bared my teeth, and chose my left lower eyetooth. It was not loose at all, but within the hour, it was; twenty minutes later I had begun to bleed freely and had almost retreated many times, but I manically soldiered on till euphoria replaced pain and the tooth came free between my forefinger and thumb and I held it up in the bathroom light like an ancient heirloom reclaimed from a still more ancient enemy, that little bloodstained shard of myself.

Both my lower eyeteeth came in huge, true canine teeth, bulging out rudely in front of my lower incisors, which are very long and slim and snugly joined against one another. My top eyeteeth are more humbly situated and sized, but they are large and sharp. Each and every last one of my adult teeth came with massive, deeply buried roots; my dental practitioners have all commented upon my x-rays with some professional interest. I had my top permanent first premolars pulled out when I thirteen (this was the first time I ever got high on  anything [nitrous oxide], and I absolutely loved it), but the surgeon said he dang near shattered the tooth trying to get it out, which was more of a wisdom tooth surgery thing; he showed me on the tooth where the pincers had crushed the enamel and made a stamp. When I got my lower wisdom teeth removed, the surgeon ended up carving holds for the pincers into the tooth with a drill, and at the height of her efforts I felt my jaw bend. She was flecked, above and below her mask, with blood and pus and tooth powder (smells acrid, tastes incredibly, overwhelmingly bitter), and sweat was beading on her forehead and running down her temples. Those bad boys had hooked roots! Huge, hooked roots, like mutant tusks.

Braces were something I resented tremendously, but I had developed a crossbite and it was a medical necessity that it be repaired, or my jaw would twist and I would wear out a few teeth well ahead of time and be left with intact teeth that wouldn't chew. In a different time I would have simply resigned myself to an adult diet consisting of soups, stews, and mashes, or allowed some barbarian neophyte to fully shatter my jaw, then place my head in a cage which held steady lead bars thrust into my flesh in order to "reshape by man's artifice what God has wrought askew." I have learned to be thankful for my time in braces.

Nevertheless, the cosmetic aspect was also stressed, and this I disliked and distrusted, not to mention the pain, discomfort, and cost to my activities (it did considerable damage to my trumpet career, I maintain, which used to infuriate me). As I feared, the braces reduced the excellent and charming gap in my large and beautiful front teeth, normalizing my smile and robbing me of one of my greatest enjoyments. I loved my gap. One of my favorite pastimes and party tricks was to shoot a substantial stream of water from my mouth using nothing but pressure created by my tongue behind my gap. I could shoot water like three or even four feet in front of my face that way! Maybe I looked a little ridiculous to people, but I love my front teeth, which are large enough to be noticeable, especially before the braces when they stuck out more, and I loved my gap, which was my face's number two feature and my smile's number one. 

Thankfully, it was never fully eliminated, as I rudely called a halt to the procedure as soon as the crossbite was fixed. Though they asked me to wear a retainer for years (scam). It has widened a little tiny bit again since, which is nice, and I have managed to chip both front teeth slightly just where they meet at the gap, which is a nice characteristic, but I doubt I shall ever again see its former glory. Lord, but I bummed myself out. I really miss my gap. They had no right, man.

My top and bottom second premolars, and my bottom first premolars, all have very high, very sharp peaks. My second bottom premolars in particular have sharklike hook points atop a high peak of tooth like a microfang. Very weird, sharp side teeth, basically. My molars are normal, what you expect from flat crushing teeth. My premolars, like my bottom eyeteeth, are absurdly canine. My top wisdom teeth came in sort of sideways, pointing out towards my cheek a bit. At least they haven't gotten infected! They had more room to come in whole, see, with my premolars gone.

That's my teeth! For now.


--JL

#80

I had a great day at work today! It is also still excellent to walk there and back. That part of life is squared away. Really, all of it. My stomach is full, my bladder is empty, my sphincter is relaxed, I've got my good health and all five senses, I don't owe money, the air is breathable, I got a roof over my head, my family around me, books in my room, lots of things to write with, lots of things to write on, musical instruments to play, cash in my pocket, the sun is shining, Christmas is coming, and so far the nuclear apocalypse has not come to pass. A lot of stuff is scary and tough, but a lot of stuff is okay, and some has a good chance of staying okay. All we can do is our best, so we gotta keep good cheer.


--JL

#79

I don't feel too much like putting one of these out, and didn't yesterday, because I'm working very hard on other projects and they feel vital and working on them is like taking in a very special drug through the typing fingers.

Never did get around to finishing that play, did I? But it's so close! It's like when the program stops loading at ninety-eight percent and the process just hangs there for three months.

Anyway, that'll come when it comes. I'm working on other stuff, so expect this blog to be a return to a very short form for a while.

So many things yet to read, so many things left to write! 

The main perk of this vocation is that childhood feeling, unalloyed. 


--JL

#78

Been thinking about feces today. I'll elaborate.

As a kid, I liked the idea of having a dog in the apartment enough to ask for one. None of the attendant realities appealed to me at all, though, and once my parents explained it to me a a couple of different times a couple of different ways, I left off for good. By the time I was six I felt like maybe it would be tolerable if we happened to one day have the kind of life where a dog would be possible, if I wasn't the one who had to be responsible for its feeding, health, safety, and most especially, its poops.

In short, I haven't seen the appeal of owning a companion animal for a long time, and a bedrock for that has always been that I have considered it beneath human dignity to handle the waste product of another animal if that animal is not the covalent in true husbandry, such as would be called manure, or for scientific inquiry. I'm talking about plops and turds, here. Usually left someplace inconvenient.

Other considerations (not exhaustive):

• yeah, you can think of it as symbiosis or coevolution but it can also be easily construed as slavery and I believe there have always been individuals and institutions ready and willing to take it to that level on the real. The carriage driver whipping the overworked nag whose entire lifespan he has stolen and brutalized to death in the street the very hour her overtaxed strength gives out: an important image.
• obviously, researchers maintain perfect dignity as they study animal feces in their noble efforts to increase our understanding of wildlife.
• most creatures bred to live in houses suffer from the same breeds of terrible and unique afflictions we self-domesticators have inflicted on ourselves and each other, such as overbreeding to the tune of gross musculoskeletal disorders, air passages that barely allow the lungs to inflate, etc. Humans selectively breed canines and felines to capitalize on traits that create miserable, stricken lives, and feed them dead food which sickens the animals and dooms them to a further-ravaged, cancer-ridden graveslope. 
• creatures bred and raised more responsibly require vast territories and huge demands on their energy and drive to maintain exemplary health. Such animals are constantly denied this by the majority of modern animal owners, largely because of factors outside their control, which is sad for everyone. People love their frustrated, anxious, and depressed animals, of course, and they love their people, but then, they would, in a codependent relationship; all these afflictions and gains are comorbid and duly portioned. I don't like the thought of playing loving jailer, personally.

Yes, pet ownership is something I had essentially relegated to a privileged fraction of the world's people, all things being equitable and just, but of course that would be a poorer world. To say that it would be more ethical for there to be less life and that most human beings do not deserve the love and companionship of creatures is to me outstandingly cruel. Life lives to beget life, to crowd in on life, to push into the cracks and break open new niches and inscribe new signs and boundaries. Sometimes it's unspeakably ugly to witness. 

Yet life endures incredible privations in the name of love, and rightly so. There is value in acting out of sheer irrationality even if we don't always like paying the price, just as there is value perfect reasoning even if it is not desirable and even harmful to act out its consequences. 

My younger brother irrationally went and got a fucking dog one day even though I told him not to do that five hundred times in a row. Now he lives on a different part of the continent, engaged in peacework. I'm here taking his dog for walks on freezing winter morning. He needs an operation in his leg, someone cut his nuts off when he was little more than a baby, he had PTSD from abuse when he came to live with the family, it took a year to calm  him down, and he's still a neurotic sort. This is an animal with intentionally bred dwarfism. But he's happy a lot. He makes us happy a lot. He's some life in our life. 

Which brings me back to handling another animal's shit, which I realized this morning, I'm finally just totally cool with. Huh, I thought to myself this morning. Once again it is shown, though you would think it would not need be so many times over, that one can  get used to anything. I do not resent picking up this warm turd that the family dog just rhythm-squeezed out its rectum in the slightest. Huh. Huh! Wonders unceasing.

*

Monkeys and apes will shit into their hands to throw it at whatever they're mad at or scared of. People do this too.

*

According to W.C. Fields: "there comes a time in the affairs of man when he must take the bull by the tail and face the situation." Also: "What is a dog, anyway? Merely an antidote for an inferiority complex..."

*

The family dog wished to take a second shit upon his walk this morning, and I lacked a second bag. He almost shat in someone's front yard before I snapped to and unfortunately yanked him from his business. However, it is very very poor form to have that sort of thing go down, so to simply abide was not an option. He tried to stop a couple more times but I hustled him out of the neighborhood we were at and onto a spit of land off the road where he could do his thing and I could quickly hoof back to after I took him home.

Having done that, I returned to the stop and hunted down his leavings. As I picked up the little pile of dogshit, I shuddered, gripped with fresh revulsion. I experienced a fundamental difference in the handling of fresh shit, filled with bacteria and complex living systems, rife with the potential to nourish, to fertilize, to give rise to life anew, and the feeling of this cold lump of matter, rendered biologically inert to human senses. It felt deader by far than a corpse, deader by far than cold raw meat dead for days and sealed in plastic. It was not sterile, not really, I know this in my intellect, but to my body, it epitomized sterility. DNA memories bloomed in my chest about it.

I guess if one were afflicted with coprophagia it would be different.

*

I've had to handle plenty of fecal matter, professionally and personally. It's not easy, at first. Personally, you know, I'm a big brother, I got lots of younger cousins. Sometimes your friends have problems. Sometimes you do. Illness strikes, catastrophe rains down a cruel rain. Your roomate heedlessly destroys their own bowels, but also, never properly cleans up after, leaving you to chip away at a hardened, reeking lacquer underneath layers of fresher spatter should you flag in cleaning up after him, or should you stop doing so in a vain attempt to get him to notice there is a problem. Professionally, well, you end up cleaning some bathrooms, at least in my career path. Sometimes the food you serve them or previous foods or sheer bad luck means they create violent, demonic scenes in these bathrooms. Sometimes drunk people seem to wish to give vent to a form of pre-mimetic creativity with only the material of the body; back to apes. As a person who has often let the lizard brain take over through the fermented passage, I have no room for judgment, but also, as a person who has cleaned up lots after others, I can hold up my head.

See, dignity has nothing to do with excretion, with "waste", which is not. Shit simply is. You gotta clean it up, or it'll cause problems. Simple. Finally I have come to be able to look Dolores Claiborne in the eye. Finally I have ceased to think myself as better or cleaner or any different than shit in my own hand. Nothing is better or worse than shit. Nothing ever could be.

*

When I was a kid, a real little kid, I stepped in massive dog doo in my nice shoes. The shock of reek  that floated up to me as my hard-soled black shoe squished through the center of the turd almost knocked my head off my shoulders; I can smell the damn thing now. I'm getting over it, though. Ha!


--JL

#77

Post seventy-seven. My preference would be to have something or do something special for the seventy-seventh post, but that's not really how life is. At least, not for me. Some people are "preparers", or "planners". Some people are "checklisters". I am neither. My driver's license expired a couple months ago. Haven't done a fucking thing. Probably I will continue to forget to do anything about this problem and however many other problems of mine I'm forgetting about for who knows how long. Do you seriously think I can be on point to do something special to celebrate a number I like?

Admittedly, it is more likely than my remembering to complete a federal census. 

Well, at least I vote.

*

There are no other writers in my life, anymore. Everybody from the old days quit, and it was the right move for them. Not only are they happier, but in plain factual talk, the tenth part of what I have written and thrown away is enough to match all their notebooks combined. All lacked what John Gardner referred to, best I can remember from his book On Becoming a Novelist, as the "driving demon." 

Writers I met later in life, people who write as much as I do or at any rate write well enough or place themselves well enough in communities of writers to be called writers, known as writers, still write, but I don't know them anymore. I have frequented such communities casually and professionally, have even made myself responsible for one such environment. I quit. One thousand times I have quit these things forever. That was a permission I had to give myself, over and over.

In many ways, not just in this matter, I am back to where I began. One day around nineteen years ago I started scribbling, alone. Now, I scribble alone.  

*

I'd like to write more, because of, y'know, the demon, but I gotta go to work.

Happy seventy-seven.


--JL

#76

Read China Men, by Maxine Hong Kingston, which was so good I feel like purchasing a case wholesale and hawking them on the corner, breathlessly enumerating the qualities of the text and the brilliance of its author as mothers drag their children to the opposite side of the street. I've bought five copies of James Baldwin's No Name in the Street just to press it on people; this is a similar feeling. Now I am reading Against Interpretation, a collection of critical essays by Susan Sontag, and rereading A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle, at the same time. 

With some collections of short stuff like essays or short fiction I like to read one of the collected works, switch to another book for a while, usually something familiar, then read the next one, and so on back and forth for a bit.

There! That should satisfy those of you who come here mainly to find out what I'm reading and what I've been reading. You're my kind of strange, you underground hip-hop classics. You funkadelic cogitators. You and me, we groove to sympathetic currents, hooking crossed thought pinkies to keep a little anchored in this byzantine swirl of a world.

*

Yesterday, as part of a tone joke, I wrote out that I agreed to work an extra shift this week. I hadn't done that really. This morning, on my second day off in a row--a weekend I had claimed not to need but which, after a six-day work week, I had warmed to--I was asked if it would be at all possible to please come in and cover a shift. Naturally I agreed. I almost always say yes. Arguably I am too open to the universe. Anyway, bonus punchline and buttress to yesterday's post. That's like, twelve percent of your packet of pre-sliced cheese for free! Yeah, think of it that way.

It's not really an extra shift, though. I get a different day off instead.  

*

No more today! 

Wait. It is long past time that I came out as absolutely loathing to death the galling lampoonery about "ancient aliens" on the History channel. Watching Action Bronson watching it with guests as everybody gets super high is something else altogether, but the base metal is just so reactive to me that it's still not great for my blood pressure or tooth enamel. 

Wait!

Action Bronson seems like a wonderful man. That link is a trash bucket; turn on all your blockers and privacy shrouds before you click it. Perhaps worth it? Maybe you don't give a fuck. That's healthy. I like strange people, strange things, and strange occurrences, all for strange reasons.

Aw, here's the first thing. God, 2016 feels like another lifetime. I think the show itself is available on Hulu. 

To people from the future: Hulu is an inappropriately and insipidly titled internet video content streaming service, one of many. Because there was a red one, there had to be a green one. 

That's a real thing companies bank on. Just as with Autozone and O'Reilly's. Some people switch back and forth or play one against the other, but there are permared customers and permagreen customers. A matter of bedrock reliance. Same with CVS and Walgreens, except of course there it is red vs. blue, just as with Coke ands Pepsi; though in both these cases, the blue team keeps a little red for their logo, red being activating and attractive to the human eye in general. All the most popular logos have red. Red and white is the broadest hitter. 

I hope some future person has to annotate that whole paragraph, but that's ridiculous optimism. The hyperintelligent cockroaches that discover hard evidence of real, factual human beings in the archaeological record will celebrate their monumental achievement by cracking a bunch of cold coca-colas back at base camp. 

THIS BLOG RESPECTS TRADEMARKS AND SHIT OK NO MORE TODAY FOR REAL for real

--JL

#75

Didn't tend towards the Girardian lens until I read a complete history of the world from cover to cover. Penguin, sixth edition, J.M. Roberts & Odd Arne Westead. I'd read lots and lots of history books before, but there was something about having it all splayed out like that. My faith in the power of world fiction to tell truths beyond truth was already in place. I have many complex feelings and ideas about envy and violence. He was a smart dude. Why do I bring this up? I saw an article about him, remembered the last article I read about him, and read today's article about him. 

By now I shouldn't have to clarify, but I will, in case: I've never one hundred percent agreed with anything, not my own senses or thoughts, no authority, not any writer or speaker, nobody, nothing. Only little practicalities, like, "I one hundred percent agree that is a ninety-degree angle. I one hundred percent agree that this noodle is boiled. I one hundred percent agree to work an extra shift this week. The noodle was not boiled? I one hundred percent disbelieve you. I checked its status myself. The noodle was unmistakably boiled."

Hey! For seven dollars, you can order up the good shit. My books are not long, but contain a great many ideas for the volume. Good word per ounce ratio. See for yourself what I pretend the truth is.


--JL

#74

When you start paying very, very close--some would say, obsessive--attention to the flow of events in your life, especially when you are a person who sets febrile store by catching out the auspicious and correct moment to take action, you will notice that everything depends on the flow of energy. Since everything in the universe is made of light, including water, which is what we are made of, this is not in the end surprising.

For the last year, I have been waiting for the right time to get in touch with a certain old friend. Today felt right. I took action.

Also today, an old friend whom I decidedly did not want to speak with tried to get in touch. Though my instinct was to ignore this, I realized that the universe had put me in a characteristic bind; to keep the flow harmonic, I would have to accept this energy, given that I had sent some out. Shit's essentially Newtonian. Couldn't be more straightforward.

So I responded. I'm not pleased! I am grossed out and angry that I had to do that, and that I will have to squander further words, time, and feeling on this matter! Lord, I hope what I sent feels better to the person I sent it to. The universe being what it is--a balance-seeking thing that eternally collapses--it's up in the air, but the math is hopeful. Newton, remember.

Have a beautiful evening, folks.


--JL

#73

The problem with virtue is that it's stupid, and everyone knows it.

Virtue lies in giving up the advantage. Virtue is beholding an arsenal and keeping your hands empty. Virtue is condemning yourself to death because you must either tell the truth or keep silent. Virtue is a winnowing-down, or up. Always the way grows tighter, narrower, the air thinner, the range of action more constricted. The virtuous path is clear, not because it is straight--a narrower, more crooked goat-track does not exist--but because it is uncluttered.

"Ah! It would be virtuous to pick a weapon from the arsenal in order to protect those who cannot themselves pick up a weapon! It would be virtuous to lie in order to save another's life, or the lives of many! A virtuous person would keep all their options open always, so as not to limit the possibility of action, the possibility of improving upon virtue's outmoded shortcomings. Virtue has been shown to lose, loses always, when it is so simple to win! How is it virtuous to lose to a bad person? You have to win! A virtuous person would be cognizant of how much more utile morals are when placed relative to everything, how much more of the greater good can be accomplished when virtue is defined as volumetric accomplishment in the service of institutions which serve the public. Joseph, I have caught you out: by adhering to the ancient, cast-down idols, you place yourself in a regressive mode, and your so-called virtue is immoral by its decrepitude, by its failure of nuance, by its inaccessibility! Virtue, if it is virtue, is actually not hard, difficult, costly, any of that--it's easy, and it's called just being a decent person. You know? Look. Justice is further along now than ever and it still totally sucks, and what the ancients called virtue was their primitive justification for all their terrible crimes, which stain the pages of our wretched histories. What you want to mean by virtue is social responsibility or liberation, or liberating yourself into your social responsibility. Don't be an asshole."

Bullshit! Ugh.

But it feels right and usually produces preferable material results: other bullshitters will respect you, or seem to in order to use you as social capital; I understand talking this way can actually land you a variety of high-paying jobs; you can give yourself permission to write off a great deal of personal responsibility with this frame of thought; it is currently popular and always easy to speak this way, so you are likely to get positive reinforcement for very little effort; you are very free make your life easier to live and more comfortable and stimulating in a staggering variety of ways; you personally get to feel morally superior to and immeasurably more intelligent than all dead people and most of your contemporaries.

Look, I get why this is extremely popular and that it feels very gratifying. It is total fucking bullshit, though.

Immaterial returns are most of what you can expect from virtue, which is part of what makes it stupid, but them's the breaks. Virtue is as inflexible and unapproachable as the truth, as dangerous and as difficult to find, as profitable, and about as palatable. Almost nobody wants anything to do with it. It is not comfortable. It usually hurts. The people who will thank you the most honestly for it are weaker than you, and can give nothing you can show for it in return. It is almost impossible to live up to and probably not even desirable. But it is virtue, and twisting things around to make them easier cannot change that.

To be virtuous is to suffer, to be a servant, and to behave idiotically; through this, one has a chance to become wise, to live in bliss, and to be free. Probably. Maybe.

I'm not going to elaborate a length on this point here. That belongs in books. I don't give too much of the real business away for free; remember, the blog supplies but sample cups! The good shit costs seven dollars. If you have a Kindle, less.

Anyway, virtue is stupid, but at least it's not bullshit. I am not, myself, virtuous; I'm not even sure that I'm trying correctly.

--JL

#72

It's December! I'm going to bed.

There is a fine drizzly mist out tonight. It collected thickly in my beard.

--JL

#71

Iron John was way, way better than I thought it would be. There is present an element that is a little too much in the vein of that detestable New-Age Pseudo-Hermeneutic Ur-Fascist nonsense to be taken seriously, but for the most part, it was a much more serious and intelligent and nourishing and correct book than I could have hoped. It was given me years ago, and the time was just right to finally read it.

This often happens; I'll lay a book by, consider reading it many times over the years, listen to the little voice inside that says "not quite yet, no, pick another.". Then I read it, the day comes, and I know that the moment was exactly ripe, that the knowledge would have saved me much time and trouble but I would not have been receptive to it, would not take it in as fully and perhaps even have abandoned it. It comes with rereading too; that sense of returning to familiar ground just when your feet most needed to be there.

By and by I shall want to write about some of the stuff that book presented me with. Also, about virtue. In the coming days, I shall bring these things forth. For today, my routine is disturbed, and I must away, hoping the disturbance does not reverberate the string of my life overmuch. It is difficult enough to resemble a tuned state even without these vagaries.

--JL

#70

After I finished Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which is very excellent, and by Philip K. Dick, I read And Then, by Natsume Soseki. It was tremendously fantastic. And today I finished The Sheltering Sky, by John Bowles. It was okay. Better as you go along.

Might go back and append the authors to all the books I mention, and also underline the titles. It's been weighing on me, frankly. Something feels immoral about how loose I've been playing it. The accumulation is beginning to grate. It's the first time I'd go back through the archive to make such an extensive edit. That feels wrong too, despite the fact that it's a perfectly professional, unobjectionable, objective, even arguably necessary edit. 

Dunno why I'm even discussing it. Whatever I do, I won't do it tonight.

What am I reading now, you ask? Iron John, by Robert Bly. It's kinda weird, but I dig it. It was a gift from an older dude. Let me tell you: this book reads like a gift from an older dude. I like it a lot and feel impelled to laugh at it, at its accoutrement and affect, but refrain from a kind of pity; it's a lot like how I felt about the man who gave it to me. It's not a mean laughter at all, though, and the pity fades as I age, replaced by more warmth, and I think, understanding, Young dudes can be harder than they realize and it's suboptimal. I honor this gift and I honor the spirit this book is written in, which is very honest and heartfelt. I honor that dude, and I hope I see him around.

Anyway, who cares? I get along too well with old dudes, frankly. But I grew up with dudes with severe emotional disturbances and I'm no picnic either. Been itching for chess matches with strangers, though, and there's no chops like old chops. 

Not sure what I'll read next. A few women in a row, I think; that was a three-dude streak. I try and juggle things a bit, keep the mind alive.


--JL

#69

My heart has been calmer lately. Overall.

Had a phone call with an old friend that undid several knots in my spirit-body. Those of you who wish to punish me are probably thinking "Thought you had no old friends, because you are the great pariah, the unforgiven!" Well, I deserve that, and I'm cool with you, fellow traveler. Go in peace. Ha-tcha! Calm heart.

Effort goes in daily to sort myself out. While walking to or back from work, with the family dog, just sitting around. It has been an active process, is what I'm saying. In order to calm my heart, I have found it necessary to hammer away at it, bang it around the place. I have needed to be by myself for many hours. I walk about one hundred minutes each work day. At work there are opportunities. At home there are comparatively vast quietnesses to sink into. I have rearranged things to maximize available quietude. 

I remember, and in silence, wear my shoes out atoning. Once again I have mended my nets, and go fishing forgiveness out of my waters.

Gotta learn, and relearn, how to forgive. 

Gotta suffer. Quietly,

When you put your face right into it, suffering changes its quality. When you understand it, and don't shy away, or get arrogant about it--when you examine it objectively, relegate it to a sphere in balance with the rest of the moment that you are experiencing in its entirety, suffering is only a part of the mixture that forms ecstasy. Agony informs bliss, from the depths to the heights. 

*

The athletic director at my middle school got it into his head that I would be a good fit for the wrestling team, even though I had never heard of the sport as such. Word got to my mom through some channel, I was never told which, and she convinced me to go to a practice and see it through. I was most unwilling; really, even revolted. I do not especially enjoy close contact with strangers and was never strongly inclined towards athleticism in early life. Always I had to be prodded to put down the book and move,

Not in good form or able wind, I found the running, calisthenics, anaerobics, and resistance exercises all positively awful. The only thing that got me through that absolute doldrum of needless pain and toil, not to mention listening to the grunting shitheads that made up the team, was the knowledge that I would only have to do this once, a single time. I have tried--my failures have been incredible, but so have my efforts--tried to be an obedient son to my parents. I was there as a one-time deal to show my mom I'd give the deal a fair shake to make her happy. She said she didn't give a damn about my making her happy, that she wanted this for my own benefit. I both believed her and didn't. 

Actual wrestling did not change my opinion of the practice. Abrasive, damp, painful, and humiliating in that it was not the first but the third or fourth practice, and even the other seventh-graders knew more moves than me. I knew nothing, Nothing at all. 

Free wrestling for three minutes was how practice finished strong before cooldown. Up to this point I had been manhandled, twisted around, put in a headlock, put in half nelson, slapped around a bit, and insulted quite a lot. I was exhausted and in a state of placid fury. Everything had been horrible, hot, and furthermore, stupid. I was also wearing inadequate shoes.

Then the dude I was wrestling picked me up above his head. I had no idea that would happen. He lunged at my legs and somehow picked me right up. Then he drove me into the mat as hard as he could. The pain was immediate and sensational, self-destroying. The completeness of the impact, the ferocity of the shock running through my torso, a blast, a slam. My mind overloaded and went blank.

I've become a little more practiced at it now, but ever since I can remember I've not had quiet in my head. I'm always talking at myself in at least two voices, and there's always thoughts coming at me several at a time. I think fast, and a lot, and sometimes I can't even talk properly from thinking. That was, I believe, the fourth time and the first time in a couple of years my mind had gone blank for even a moment.

Then it hurt even worse and it all came back. Then a curious elation, what I now recognize as a high.

It was this high, its aftereffects still buzzing in my suddenly singing muscles, as well as the memory of that moment of silence, that made me reply, when asked a little later how the practice had gone, that I would be back the next day.

--JL

#68

Not since I was anticipating the very first winter of my life at the age of five have I felt so favorably towards the snow and the short days as this year. I am glad every day for the cold and the sleet, the colder the fiercer, the fiercer the warmer. It has taken nineteen years of hard work and incremental gains, but I have at last relearned my child's devouring glee in the blustering snow and the whipping wind, in plunging through the dire season with a furnace in my heart.

Also very excited for Christmas this year! Really, just generally thankful for everything that's happening. Been seeing lots of hawks, it is glorious, staggering, blessed three times three times.

--JL

#67

World of Warcraft never captured me. I played it for the first time very late, thought it was very good for a half hour, then never wanted to play again. I pretty much didn't! It's not my idea of a game. 

Thinking about it today, as one does even if you don't play it (its power is that huge; to call it greater than merely nine thousand would be paltry) I wondered if it would make it more fun to somehow hook up your whole control scheme in order to use your keyboard like an instrument in order to "play" a boss in timed, variously complex "chords", or other sequential keystroke challenges. I understand the boss battles are very repetitive; this would perhaps elevate them. I don't know how it might be done. I am mostly an idea man; raw execution is only my speed in limited goal-based activities, such as scoring in video games, single combat, and slicing onions exactly.

Writing is a transitive state between ideation and execution, and occupies space as twilight does, and the predawn.

Somebody could probably mess with the code of the game and with their hardware enough to execute what I talked about in some form, probably way cooler than what I'm able to come up with. It is magnificent how adroitly we are able to manipulate these facets of reality and how quickly we have learned to bend them to our will in ever more fantastic arrangements, with ever more powerful processing and rendering and ever more capacious stores of memory. 

One fine day, a conversation between teenagers catching up in between classes may come to sound like this:

"Did you hear what Larry did with one of the pocket universes in his Sub-DimenStation? Motherfucker made his will into a form of living obsidian and shaped it into a world the size of ten suns, a world whose hunger would not die till the last star goes dark. At the extreme northern pole of that grim leviathan of the void, he let rise a spire to pierce the breast of what heavens may glare upon such wasted sorrows, and at its pinnacle he spliced a neural network his little sister sculpted into a kind of consciousness syringe to see if the spire can act like a reverse brainstem and he can make a sentient death planet to upload to people's Intranet ports when they come in for an unshielded update. He thinks it'll eat their personalities."

I dunno, some shit like that. 


--JL

#66

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

That is the book I chose to read. Promise kept! First promise kept in a while. I'll take a lesson, and make fewer promises. Should I succeed in mounting a proper discipline, I shall never again make another promise; else, become a phenomenon who can make any promise true through sheer will to power.

We'll see how it all shakes out in the end.


--JL

#65

Earlier, I fell asleep. Now, further sleep seems a challenge. All my life, I have avoided naps--nothing but trouble! Growing up I found institutionally-mandated nap times a razor-sharp variety of tyranny. I have ever scorned the nap, and taken vain pride in my wakefulness and verve. Now they begin their long revenge. Can't keep my eyes open after a walk, a shift, a walk, and a meal. It's okay if it's not too long, but I slept from about four to eight. Not cool.

*

I used to live about a quarter mile from a gas station and a liquor store. I was on my own and having all sorts of bad relations, dropped out of college, nuthin' job, and in constant spiritual, philosophical, psychosexual, financial, and emotional crisis. I felt ancient and overpowered, like I'd seen too much shit to stomach anymore--a thousand lifetimes of the same gray anarchy--and like I could rip a stone pillar out of a concrete foundation and fling it like a javelin. A young man, newly minting his twenties.

Bought a lot of cigarettes at that gas station. Walked over lots of times, once a day at least, you know. The last cigarette I paid for I rolled myself, early last summer. I gotta be better about not bumming any more. Tobacco is some fucked up shit.

*

Just now I finished reading Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston. It was exceedingly tremendous. Before that I had reread Bleach from the first to the last, for I had completed my collection of all seventy-four volumes. That was good as hell. Before that I reread Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain. Those are some of my favorite books ever. I'll tell you what I've decided to read next tomorrow.

The full moon two mornings ago--that was fucking excellent. Hey! Read my books?


--JL

#64

When I was a teenager I made tons of lists. I don't really do that anymore. What kind of a list would I even make nowadays? What list would be useful to me.

It strikes me that it used to help me get my thoughts in a certain order, but I gave up having ordered thoughts. Or anyway, thoughts ordered in integral sequences, or aimed towards generating rankings or the keeping of personal statistics.

*

It was the coldest Thanksgiving on record. That was an enjoyable thing, I thought. It was I who thrice walked the family dog! I volunteered. If there had been no family dog to walk (as I had advocated) I would have taken a walk regardless. Record-breaking shit, you want to see and feel as much of that for yourself as you can match to your tastes and abilities.

Thanksgiving is, speaking historically and as national holidays go, monstrous. The myth that upholds the feast--an upside-down and backwards-ass big fake smile deception--bears the mark of the Adversary in plain and indisputable terms. Then there's alcohol and family dynamics and football and trauma everywhere, reverberating through every human soul.

Everything is in how you do it, though. A harvest feast to give thanks. Plain and simple. Worth doing. Good things can happen when you feed people. A lot people get fed on Thanksgiving.

As for the day set aside, well, the day set aside is the day of reckoning; so it has always been and so it is every year. Do the best version of every twisted thing--and everything in this world has been twisted--and you will be doing your part to uphold what is decent and worthwhile in human life. Let how you do things be a fortress against disintegration and a direct challenge to people who get off on ruining things.

I might say similar stuff around Christmas.

For my part I had excellent Thanksgiving thoughts. My family and I enjoyed a special repast, rich and plentiful but not excessive. Very nice. It was a blessing to be with them. I played all my musical instruments except my ocarina. I realized lately that I've lost my harmonicas somehow. I am thankful anyway.

I hope you had a good Thanksgiving. I know it can be rough as hell.


--JL

#63

I was precisely the "blazing, unchecked, nigh-supernatural fever" age when Pocket Monster Mania swept the nations of the world. Being a contrary sort, I held out for a little bit--the toys, the cards, the cartoon, it was all appealing enough in its way, but I held it at arm's length a bit. As far as Japanese Animation went, I held that Dragon Ball, Knights of the Zodiac, and Rurouni Kenshin (Samurai X) were superior to the yellow mouse and his whole deal. Until I played the games.

Man, I still play those games. Buy new ones every time they make 'em and sell 'em. Pull the old cartridges out for old time's sake now and again. I used to stay up late, dreaming so hard on a life free in the fields and forests and mountains with my beloved parters at my side that I would break a sweat and basically hallucinate.

All manner of complex ideas about Pocket Monsters brew in my mind. Ah, and the memories.

Watched the movie where Mewtwo threatens to take over the world using clones with a friend of mine and I cried in a movie theater for the first time in my life. I now bring a handkerchief to the theater, and not for my sinuses. I heard that dude got rabies but did not die, a few years after I moved away. I heard he stayed weird and extremely unpopular, just like when we played pretend together, folding innumerable paper airplanes and exploring highly unlikely but tremendously exciting fictional scenarios years after the little kids around us started to get off on pretending to be adults, which is what fucks up the entire planet and really spoiled a great many recess periods. 

Respect to that dude. Hand on my heart. I'll never forget watching that movie, or what a good guy he was.


--JL

#62

It is so laughable that we seek to know, and even funnier that we declare what we think we know to be correct and permanent! I realize I've started a post this way before, but I cannot care and will very likely do so again. The vanity is endlessly baffling, and so hugely absurd--the joke never grows stale.

There is no end to thinking. There is no end to thought. As long as there is life, it will communicate with life and with the incommunicable beyond, which will tend to life as even life tends to cease being life, to go beyond communication. So what is preserved? And what is the value of preservation, and how long can a memory last? Questions are always alive, answers are always dead. Yet it is through the answers that we seek to build our lives.

What is human existence as an unbroken stream of consciousness but a few sentences, a brief snatch of bloodied song? How much of the universe has every person that has ever lived seen? Expressed? Set down for posterity?

Nothing! It is nothing! One big guess! Unclear in the particulars! And soon, we will forget, blinded by our new versions of old stories and distracted by the fresh contours of new guesses, for which we will scream and kill and die.

If the universe is a forest, all humanity is but stepping underneath the eaves at its edge, and looking around. Briefly, in fear, squinting through shadows.

Speaking in personal, more quotidian terms, if the universe is a forest, then our lives--every thought we think every tree we see, every step we take between the trunks--on paths or through the undergrowth--with guides and partners or all alone--is knifing blazes into the bark, etching markings into the surface of things to show ourselves where we've been, how we got to where we are. 

Collectively or alone, it all comes down to a little patch of "familiar" ground; growing a little every day, maybe, but never more than the most infinitesimal before the incalculable spread of the universe, of time.

Can't go back. No unmarking a marking. No unpathing a path, no unreading a word. No shortcuts, either. Can't get to the edge. Can't read ahead. Can't force static--as if it weren't enough that the trees don't end; they never stop changing, either, and the markings that we make change too; fade, become grown over, lose their meaning, go abandoned and become rediscovered. 

Always, always, the threat of fire, of flood, of blight, of unstoppable decay, of becoming totally lost--having all that we have come to think we know, all that we have come to hold dear torn away from us, violently or through senescence. Death might tear us by the roots or creep in through the leaves, but always, it roams the woods, and how can we object? Every throat alive is bared to death, and if it swept through like a shadow and took its due all in a day, and the human story ended all abrupt mid-sentence as it was just beginning, all the knowledge we pretended meant so much would be lost as if it had never been gained--and so what?

Knowledge may last longer than any one of us, but it is more mortal and less significant than even the meanest life. Knowledge serves life, is subordinate to life. And life is in the heart. 

A single heart has more value than the entirety of human knowledge. Offer me the choice between them and I will not hesitate for a fraction of a second--I would eliminate all living memory for the sake of a single life. Knowledge, thought, wisdom: these are toys, at best. Usually, chimeras. 

What matters is the seeds.

To live among trees is a gift. To walk and breathe in an uninterrupted flux, moving through the flesh of a great rushing wind--what else is there? The whole point is to be a tiny vantage in a vastness, to be a dancing particle, to see what there is to see while we have eyes to see it.

Feeling our hearts. Feeling through our hearts. Our hearts, knowing nothing, present us with the true nature of our world, with the full meaning of the universe.

Dying senselessly in the woods--the very best that we can hope for.


--JL

#61

11/17. That's a special day for me. I have mentioned my favor for seven, and eleven, and seventeen, and one hundred and seventeen, and other such permutations. I also like primes, so I like that this is the sixty-first post. 

No special deed, nor any ritual; no observance at all really except for my private acknowledgement that the calendar has branded this day with those numbers. To a person of my psychic makeup and spiritual background, significance is its own reward, and its own justification.

*

I walk by a field with a sycamore at the far edge on my way home. It stands all stark among a throng of smaller, uniformly dark trees. To the eye they are nameless drab, a murmuring backdrop like sackcloth behind a graceful nude in white marble. The tree, tall and slender, leaps into the field of vision, springs up fresh every day like the next step of a nigh-incomprehensibly slow dance yet more joyful in high exuberance and vaulting through an air more upper and rarefied than any dancer quickened by heart and pulse and dragging bone could ever hope to even briefly breathe.

*

Incidentally, the skis by the speed limit sign never did get picked up by the trash folks. Eventually, they were thrown into the underbrush near the sign, which is just up a hill from the place where I look over at the field with the sycamore tree.

*

There is a row of sycamore trees by the river in the park across the river from the bluffs which are my favorite place to be in town. They are huge, towering, thick bastions whose great slabs of bark could split the top of your head open when they come down on a molt. 

Eagles sometimes build their nests in their highest branches. Hawks nest all around there. The trails take you to places where you can stand high above the world, above the branches where the raptors build their generations and ply their killing drive, above the rivers and bridges and the playgrounds and the fields and the roads. 

Above all that pounded pavement and all those lived-in, worked-in buildings. Above all the shadows being cast.

*

My face is cold. I need to grow a beard. My hair is bothering me, so I ought to shave it down. I wore my hair long for a long time. I've been keeping it tight for a while.

I think we have embarrassingly close relationships with our hair. Even a brutalist or performatively non-performative or minimalistic approach is this whole fucking undeniable thing. 

As for my beard, it mainly reminds me of mortality. 

*

Cool. That's a very believable blog post; totally full of words and images. Chew on that, readers! Masticate! Devour! 

Happy November the seventeenth, everybody. Do your part to bring about peace on earth. Whatever small victory you can score.


--JL

#60

Ergonomic graphics in crisp full-spectrum color displays at unheard-of resolutions. Unflagging aural stimulation in ultrapersonal suite determined by algorithm and decision-tracking.

Now me, I like a nice, comforting monochrome. Perhaps some deep greens and sober tans. The humbler shades of blue. 

When I first had a "smart"phone, it was like having a scab. I'm a scab-picker. The iphone was a psychic scab, designed just so by its wicked artificers, and I constantly took it out in order to pick at the surface of my brain, exposing a raw wound into which the device sprays spores that burrow deep into the cortex, where its wretched payload blooms into your synapses. I went mad and crashed into a kind of informational and para-emotional rock-bottom, and used various burner dumbphones for a year and a half. 

Now that circumstances have forced me back onto the glass nipple, I keep that shit on grayscale. No apps. It's an iPod that makes work calls. If peer-pressured, I will google something. I handle its glistening contours, even locked in a lifeproof case, like something razor-sharp and dripping with poison, designed by an oppressor to keep me mentally neutered and give me actual cancer, because that is what it fucking is.

Also, and I realize for some reason this makes me sound like a tinfoil weirdo, but don't we have enough shit interfering with our systems without making our very headphones radiators and emitters a centimeter away from our brains at all times? The physicality of cables may be irksome, but damn. 

"Fuck it," we'll say. "Bury a chip-sized satellite transceiver branded with the logo of your choice right at the base of the nervous system. Get right in the deep meat. We are sick of using our ears to listen to EDM twenty-four hours a day and our eyes to unceasingly digest propaganda. 

Put that shit on autopilot. I want to eat, and shit, and binge-watch, and the rest is on Twitter."


--JL

#59

Before I got sick, I saw a red-tailed hawk do some magnificent flying. She lit from the top of a municipal light to  cross a road and wing her way powerfully across an empty soccer field over to the treeline by the river. She was a strong, built, stocky bird, well-made for self-directed, energetic flight. She engaged in a great deal of exuberant altitude-play once across the river before deigning to perch. Clearly, some birds have seasons in their prime wherein the lean season and the easy pickings blur together. The tightening days trouble them not at all. I'm watching some fat robins make mock of the snowy day we're having right now, in fact. They look like chubby little frat boys screwing around together.

*

Putting books on a wall is a lot like putting maps on a wall. I used to have both, but I lost all my maps. I love cartography. Basically I love data points arranged in space, in whatever dimensionality or variety of such you please. Finally, the feeling of being surrounded by connections both unintentional and personal, by literal battlements of psychic power, is a very potent defensive barrier. I cannot recommend it enough. 

I don't have any shelves right now. I have instead arranged great stacks, mostly against walls, a few freestanding, all around the walls of my room. It's a mess, but even in this chaos there are little jokes and coincidences to ponder. For example, I see a series of books that was important to an ex of mine and their sibling just beneath a copy of Civilization and Its Discontents that their mother gave to me as a gift--unintentional, but a nice little twinge. Freud would heartily approve, which carries the whole thing into the realm of the truly disgusting.

Gender Trouble is right over Peter Pan. Amusing. Would that I had any Alison Bechdel to add to the mix; alas, Ulysses is across the room--atop You Can't Go Home Again. Who seethes the more? Ugh. I miss my maps. Ah, well, but they were maps of Middle-Earth anyway. Who the hell am I kidding.

Too many books, folks. Too much bullshit. 

I know a dude, a mechanic works out of a garage in a Citgo station, who once a few years back asked me why the fuck I was reading. Since I was on the clock and delivering him auto parts, I told him I didn't get paid enough not to read a few minutes every stop. 

"No, motherfucker, I'm  talking about why the fuck do you even do that. Read books. All that bullshit. It's all fucking lies."
"Well, lies are kind of the point, with fiction--"
"All of it, motherfucker! I mean all of it! Don't even talk to me about fiction, I mean every book is just lies, history, religion, social shit, all that fuckin bullshit. My fuckin wife, she's always reading books, listening to the news, and now she's full of fucking bullshit. Making her waste her fuckin time thinking about problems that have nothing to do with fuckin anything. Lies!"

At this point I put the book down and leaned forward, interested. "Hold up, man. Are you saying you don't read anything? Like, no books ever, no magazines, no news, because it is all of it nothing but lies? What the fuck do you think is true, man?"

He smiled and waved his hand to show he'd been hot-airin' a little, but dragged his cig and bore down on his point. "Almost all lies, almost, fucking bullshit anyway, news, definitely lies, history, so much lies--listen, the real thing is business, every day. Work. Fuckin money. This shit right here, bitch. Fucking books just fill your head with bullshit, bullshit keeps you from making money. You're a smart motherfucker, you don't need to be reading no books."

Many pleasant arguments with him as we whiled away the cigarettes, neither of us much shifting our positions. Yet, given time and the reading of a lot more books, I find I have become more warmed to his viewpoint than I would have ever believed possible.

Hey, have you read my now-in-paperback lies?


--JL

#58

The light is very good right now. I mean the sunlight on the surface of the world right now, where I am, looking out the window. I have spent a great many hours of my life looking out the window. It is a good pastime. Noble. Quiet hours.

Quiet hours are a gift from heaven. So is light.

Sometimes light kisses everything it touches and carves it fresh and clean and new. Draws the glory and power of everything under the sun to the utmost under the eye; the eye rejoicing, rejoicing.

*

Hell's exact location has been famously pinpointed--earthly cohabitation with other human beings. Each human mind is a Hellmouth, dripping vile temptations and a lifetime of betrayal and abuse.  Your mind, too, is a portal to a nightmare dimension. Your friends and family--why, they helped shape your nightmare dimension, even as your cosmic energy and your choice of words influences theirs.

Human beings are also sanctuaries. The minds of others can be hallowed ground, can be gardens. We can carry around little altars to one another in our hearts, and be the talismans that protect one another in dark places. Yes, there are darknesses we could never have borne or crossed, without the light of another human being to help us stumble through.

Our hearts are shrines, yes; also, battlefields, and battlefields are where casualties breed.

To speak more practically, friendship is a contract wherein two hearts build a bridge between themselves and engender a certain flow or exchange between themselves. This flow, made up of events, communication, energy, and time, is a bond. Be it the puddle of acquaintanceship, the wide river of many years of closeness and endeavor, or the inland sea of a lifelong journey, there exists between two hearts and time an exchange of energy, of memory, of trust. There exists in this arrangement an inherent risk of imbalance, in addition to the inevitable series of arithmetical transformations and tonal modifications to the contract--attached subcontracts, hidden clauses, annulments of pertinent minutes, supplementary materials, renegotiations and the acknowledgement of ramifications such as those pertaining to insults, forgetfulness, and betrayals ranging from the microscopic and only appreciable in the aggregate to reversals so egregious they have spilled onto the pages of human history and haunted the universal myth. Also, people just change. It happens.

People's hearts are different sizes and shapes and have different kinds of energy. Any child knows this. Some fit together and complement one another, managing a reasonably even flow of energy over fairly sturdy bridges. Some don't fit that well initially, but manage to find an equilibrium. Some hearts, due to internal quirks or traumatic factors, will tend to seek hearts that they can dominate or manipulate into an uneven flow of energy that benefits them at the expense of the other. Some hearts will seek to be dominated by such hearts, and some will repel them. 

Some hearts change into other hearts while they're still connected up to other hearts, because of circumstances. Sometimes bridges suffer structural damage that have nothing to do with energy flow, and everything to do with distance, or some fresh shock or wound that cannot be shared and which poisons life with silence, burning bridges with cold fire. Sometimes we just go crazy, and start setting torches to all our bridges ourselves, for no good reason other than to welcome despair, or because our hearts are giving us bad advice, perhaps because some other heart wishes us ill, for reasons of its own. Sometimes you don't even realize you lost a bond until, years later, with a start, you realize that behind you, for no particular reason, lie a thousand dried-out stream beds and river bottoms. a thousand little tombs where once fresh flowers were laid at altars in the heedless hope of youth.

It can be tough not to take it personal. Instinctively, the organism understands the perceived source of its experienced pain as antagonistic. You want to blame--people in general, specific individuals for their exact faults, yourself. You want to sketch a story that allows you to make sense of how things have played out.

You have that right. After all, every heart that was joined to yours has changed your heart in one way or another, whether you realize it and reckon with it or play havoc with yourself. Some hearts will use what they get from you to cause you pain you did not think could ever have been possible.

But while you might have to get the fuck away from someone and do your damnedest to make sure they can't get near you again--to blame them, to turn your altar into a butcher's block, is to let that hurt fester, and where that hurt festers, it will spread its infection and make you hurt yourself and hurt others.

Hearts come into and out of our lives. We find ourselves retracing our steps in places we never thought we would set foot in again, finding everything changed but the ghost of familiarity behind each new perspective. Fresh flows turning long-dessicated, cracked earth to fertile stream mud once again. Sometimes we find that the torches we set sprung a mighty blaze, but perhaps more billow and roar than heat--and we are relieved that the framework still bears weight. For we have come to grieve what is truly beyond our power to heal, and see that healing was a choice we did not make, but could have.

*

Still a little sick. Hope to be all better tomorrow. Good night.


--JL