#25

Life has been most disturbed of late. How it rankles, even grates--even, I say, grinds upon me to come to you twice in a row bleating apologies for my unconscionable silence. Nevertheless, life has been most disturbed of late, and what can be done?

Well, I could disturb my sleep in order to maintain output even in the face of unexpected tasks and duties. But subtracting from your own quality of life merely to live strikes me as the enterprise of a fool, and I no longer have that young man's verve which lends such foolery charm, and the purposefulness of experience farming.

Old heads will know what I'm talking about--letting a young person do something like an idiot, wasting a bunch of energy for nothing because they think they know better than you, and they're hungover and grumpy because they ate a cold spoonful of beans four hours ago and didn't sleep so much as laid unconscious on the couch they rescued from the landfill, surrounded by empties and overflowing "ashtrays". You could do the task in two seconds with a practiced, well-rested gesture, but you know what? It's okay that they'll take two minutes just to fuck it up. They need this pain in order to molt that hideous chrysalis.

That's how I became an adult: with my own gin-reek roaring in my nostrils, slicing my hand open for the ten hundredth time, showing up late to open the store only to find that I left the key in my other pair of pants, getting into an actual fistfight with my boss' husband, running over a dude's toolbox with the fleet vehicle, my ex screaming at me in front of customers, shattering a five hundred dollar piece of glass...

The whole trick is having done stuff wrong so many times that I can see myself doing something wrong from a mile away.

Anyway, tomorrow is October first. Not just October first! It is Monday, October first. A special day in the calendar of my people. I like the number seventeen. I have mentioned this.


--JL

#24

I missed another day yesterday! No excuse. The day just passed it by. Practiced four musical instruments, walked and fed the dog, went to the market with my mom, read a bunch. Had ample time, but it didn't happen, but I accept this, personally. The blank spaces in some days simply aren't meant to be filled.

Standing on a low hill yesterday, feeling the wind, I existed completely and totally, with no thoughts in my head at all. Only the vast silent rush of the holy wind. Personally I would not replace that moment with my own digital chattering, no matter how apt or amusing or pointless. However, if you happen derive some sustenance from my humble noises, I do apologize that I was not where I was supposed to be.

I can offer you most days! Most. But no truth-seeking person makes promises. Only one man ever made a true promise, and as we are, we can but reach up to that height, straining and failing.

This is all by way of saying that damn play is probably not going to be ready by October first. A lot of things changed since I made that plan, which is how the world works. I still mean to try. This blog is all I've had the juice for since I started, and work demands as work is wont, but things are settling down.


--JL

#23

One of the main things in life is to get away from everyone you ever knew and who ever knew you and learn who you are again. The person both behind and beyond the character you have created in order to survive this world. The more complete the vanishing act, the better. God will bring you back to those who in his wisdom, he has linked you. Some you will never see again, and that too is a mathematical and logical consequence of grace. Sad and sweet, like your own tears falling into your mouth can be. Even bitter partings and hardened hearts have their place in the pattern; some wounds must heal in another life, after the sufferer has already transformed, and the song undergoes a translation.

Simple, really, and never less than the very peak of elegance. 

*

Nobility is no more than the relaxed and cheerful acceptance of ever-changing suffering punctuated by death, and the sublime joy of each profound and elongated moment of such radiance.

*

Good to be back to work. It's a deep and satisfying sort of pleasure to hustle hard and break a sweat. I drank a fucking delicious glass of milk today. Drink raw milk from happy cows living on small wild-pasture farms, everyone. That boiled dead shit from the supermarket sucks a soft dick in an alley where the dumpster grease never stops trickling.

Took a short and pleasing walk with my mother and the family dog. I watched small brown poops squeeze out of his pink anus, and thought briefly about the sliding scale and many modifiers of human dignity.


--JL

#22

That car place I used to work at couldn't offer me anything reasonable, so I went back to an old kitchen I heard was in some needs and they gave me part-time for a buck more an hour than when I left so I can bargain up more money for full-time and promotions. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, I guess; they overworked and underpaid me like a pack of graceless savages and lied smiling about upcoming raises and how much they appreciated me. Now I believe them, since their place lost a ton of loot after I wasn't there to do a bunch of shit no one wants to do. But I like how clean and small the kitchen is. It's very clean, and quite small. The drama stays low-level for the most part. I'm happy to be back.

Anyway, sorry to miss a day. I walked to work, and all the way home the long way. I was tired, and then I walked to work again this morning. Man, my shirt was fricking soaked in sweat when I got to work! It's cold now, in the mornings, but the kind of cold where as soon as your blood heats up from a little action you're stuck sweating under your coat or sweater, and at that point I've walked a fifth of a mile and there's four more to go. The first part of autumn can really use summer's lingering attitude to mess with your choices. But I packed a dry shirt. I been walking to my workplaces for a while, now, there's plenty of tricks.

Okay, I'm going to go eat some pasta with mushrooms in it and pet the family dog. Then I'm going to read a book. May God bless our souls with everlasting mercy.


--JL

#21

Man, when a sink makes a crude noise and eructs a cool half-gallon of dull green stinking organic slime up into itself. What a stupid part of a day.

If I had to fix it, that's all I would talk about. But I don't. I just have to get up at a quarter to five.

Jokes are pretty good. Wouldn't be much of a point to anything at all without jokes, probably. Okay, I got other stuff to deal with today. Everything's changing today, a whole new life begins tomorrow. No time for a lot of talk.


--JL

#20

I used to think that bad critics had to be answered, that one's bounden duty is to couch one's lance and mow down idiot critics and their malformed ideas before their bad medicine infects any innocents.

But you're never gonna stop crap reading and lazy thinking and bad faith. Their value by the pound and the cost of manufacture will always make them an easy investment, and people love things that are easy more than they love anything else. The only critics that matter live behind your eyes and write inside your skull, so best be careful how you censor them, and what coin you pay them with.

Still, however much my tongue stays bitten, whenever I read some correct-tone sucker being so wrong about so much and making a highfalutin' rep off their stunted abilities, in my mind I marshal the banners, and the sun gleams brightly off the points.

My books are available for the most ferocious and even baseless of criticisms. I don't give a fuck as long as they get read.

*

When I was a kid my parents took me up the Andes mountains a fair few times, the northernmost part of the range. They're amazing mountains, really weird places with fantastic, nigh-unrealistic stuff like giant condors gliding around, and pits of ice-cold water with surface greenery that look exactly like the solid-rooted scrub around them, eye and foot giving no warning as to their presence.

In the little villages up the in the passes and clustered on the plateaus, the most notable structures are still the chapels, some of them more than three hundred years old, near wishing wells even older. I saw a passion procession once when we were up there Easter time, winding its way down the steep cobbled streets. The kid Roman soldier was ceaselessly yelling out a careful cadence of abuse, whipping the shit out of kid Jesus with a circus strap that cracked like snapping seasoned wood but had no stinging power. Kid Jesus shambled along bent under his big cross, all wrapped in white linens with fake bloodstains running down them, long wig under fake thorns hiding his face, surrounded by kid apostles and kid saints and kid bystanders. I say kids; they were Big Kids to me at the time. Couldn't have been more than thirteen, any of them. The bystanders and saints threw spring flowers all over each other, and kid Jesus, and the street, and so did some of the people lining the streets to watch them go by, flowers all along the stones. And kid Roman soldier ever whipping, eyes blazing, reminding.

I had my first bout of constipation up those mountains, and strained for perhaps a whole hour to bring forth a perfectly round ball of hardened shit that could have been shot from a small cannon. It was the first ailment of my life that had me thinking I might die; I remember the sweat dripping from the end of my nose, between my legs and into the water, wishing I could crack my butt open like an egg.


--JL

#19

I just want to know--when has it not been hard times on this old planet? It's never! Everybody's always dying in incredible numbers for obscure philosophical and theological reasons, from savage politics and needless wars, and the very earth's wanton and incomparable destructive power. It's normal, and it always costs a lot of fucking money.

Oh! Everybody saying it's worse now than ever is also something that has been said the entire time. Better now than ever, too.

I saw the news a little on TV this week. I haven't had a TV in a very long time, and it was a very, very strange reacclimatization. It was hard, but in just a few short sessions, I didn't know what the fuck was going on, or what the fuck I was talking about--but I knew that what I knew was of incredible national importance.


--JL

#18

Ordinarily I would offer an anecdote in exchange for taking up part of the post with an exhortation to read my books, on which I worked quite hard, and which are notable for their availability.

I'm not doing that today because I'm really a very busy person. Do you think that all I ever have to do is sit around and try to be entertaining? No, fuckers! I barely have time to shove a fistful of almonds into my teeth before I have to go put out some form of easily preventable fire.

Read the fucking books! They're short, and I did my damnedest to make it worth more than the investment. I'm not asking you to choke down Infinite Jest so you can finally tell your cousin you thought it was or was not smart without lying through your teeth. We're all straightforward people here, and we like words. I think we can do business. You want paperbacks, is that it? Coming soon. I just need to find the scratch to mind the gap.


--JL

#17

I'm not going to do anything special for this post. I did a lot of stuff today, and also yesterday, and part of what I did yesterday was write a long-ass intricate post. Eastbound and Down is on, so fuck this blog today. "Kiss my ass and suck my dick, everyone", to quoth Mr. Powers.

See, for example, I just spent ten minutes laughing, instead of writing. It was great. Profanity is so good, it is so funny. Thank God for a good long braid of fucked-up cussing and farcical low terribleness. Plus that good old real talk, crunchy hot guitars, and red dirt follies.

Something I did today was eat a sandwich, and before that, some chicken and mushrooms. Also I drove a bunch of books around, deposited a check, applied for a job, drove a bunch of jars around. I didn't curse anyone out, engage my braggadocio, or even raise my voice. I avoided cocaine, bags full of spray paint, and hard liquor, and did no indecency to anyone.

--JL

#16

The pride we take in what we think we know is catastrophic. Knowledge has a well-deserved reputation for its many utilities as well as for its psychic pleasures and rigors, but it cannot shield you from ignorance, which is always vaster and stronger than knowledge. No person in one lifetime can accumulate enough knowledge to outweigh their own ignorance, speaking proportionally.

Power, maybe, but paper power. Sometimes literally.

Speaking practically, everything you think you know about a person doesn't add up to jack shit in the face of what you couldn't possibly know, including your own trueborn mother or child. I don't feel like I need to offer a lot of support for this statement, but maybe I find people more complex than most like to admit they are. I understand the flair and the paycheck that go with seeking out the good old lowest common denominator.

Hackable human beings! At the mercy of the corpostate! I guess if you didn't grow up with a million stories like this to hand, falling onto your head in their tottering heaps at the used bookstore, this is an alien notion with one of those payloads which inspires that revulsion which precludes clear thinking.

Frankly, it is a transparent shell game these terrormongers are constantly playing. I mean, look. People can't be both smarter, better-informed, and more literate than they've ever been and laughably psychically malleable at the same time. Unless maybe these things are complementary, and sort of play off each other, maybe as trends? I dunno. Parallel evolution. Sympathetic parasitism. Are you feeling my spitballs? That's what this is. Trickster vs. Lawgiver. Man vs. Self , but also that one Escher drawing of the hands drawing each other--generative Ouroboros, in a backdrop of boundless stagnation which gives way eventually to the fertility which will degenerate, die, stagnate, and so forth unto infinity. Get this: the drawing and the backdrop both represent people fucking each other, in two totally different ways. Spitballin'.

That our field of action which goes unpunished can be limited by forces we have absolutely no way to influence bespeaks a situation where negative freedom is compromised, quantifiable, and reduced even to zero. Our freedom to act and think in ways that lead to punishment and even destruction, in futility, for nothing, for ideas that may not matter and cannot be proven, for a stupid and shitty thing like love, for whatever, really--that we are always, always free to do, which is positive freedom and should not exist but does.

That we can be hacked implied that we were first programmed, which is already delicious, but even better, it suggests that as programs which can hack one another, we are programs which can build firewalls to protect themselves and other programs. In a hack or be hacked world, defenses and advantages always spring up, must always spring up. Vacuums yawn as titans fall, and the young lions rush onto the killing grounds, to find who will rise above the rest. The metaphors, you see, just keep on coming.

It's a complex universe, folks. There is no need to listen to assholes trying to sell it as a solved game. I suspect one good way to get hacked is to go around trying to win a bunch of arguments. It's all just fractals, in a sense.

By way of saying: it's all a very stylish way of showing, as always, that nothing is new and things are the exact same as they have ever been. Fresh coat of paint and a new angle; people buy the car all over again, perhaps for even more money than the last time around.


--JL

#15

Huh. I hadn't realized that the post numbers match the day of the month right now. What a stupid thing to notice, and to mention!

I've heard often that it's best never to let them see you're weak. In boxing and wrestling you keep your hands up and stay bouncy, making your body tell your opponent a bunch of lies because you feel perhaps the worst you've ever felt. In public, shame prevents us from breaching the social contract with our feelings, even when they are perhaps the worst ones we have ever felt, so we give every appearance, so far as this is possible, of  having a fulfilling, even bracing day, always. With lovers you tell a bunch of lies, even though you feel perhaps the worst you've ever felt. And so on.

I have found this to be terrible advice! When no one knows you're weak, no one eases up, or helps you, ever! Extremely poor life advice, unless you are a tactician. And then, it may be best modulated and put into use as "never let them see where you're actually weak."

But life has destroyed the better and most practical part of my nerves, and the only pride I have is the sort that prevents one from "being a bother", so I keep stayin' bouncy.

Today I burnt a wad of checkbooks. It was medium-satisfying.


--JL

#14

My keyboard started working again! No idea why. I didn't do anything about it except pop the battery out and pop it back in, which did nothing. I would listlessly open the laptop, bring up the on-screen keyboard, poke around, look at some websites, and close it again. I did this a little while ago, and lo, everything was as it was in the before-time, when the elk were plentiful, and a hunter had his pride.

So, good fortune has laid its gentle hand upon my wrack'd brow, and I am thankful that I have lived to see it be so once more. One more day is shrouded in its winding sheet, and one more mote of grace to give thanks for. I've always been lucky in that particular way; effortlessly escaping previous bad luck, life a constant storm with a bumper crop of silver linings. Just enough to keep the twinkle in the eye.


--JL

#13

Watched part of Bruce Almighty three days ago. The meta on this thing is fucked up.

Two thousand and three! The world is incredible. As a very young man, the slightly less young men whose cultural output you watch like a hawk in order to better ruin your own twenties bewail the settling of dust upon their shining halcyon days. I mocked those men, for their puerility! My urine was a potent nigh-hydrant-force stream, my laughter strident as it reddened my cheeks, and I shaved those bad boys in under thirty-seven minutes. Now here I sit, and it has been fifteen years since Bruce Almighty hit the theaters. At last it rests upon my own tongue: the dead notes of a summerwine whose time is past, the dust of the grave commingled with the vinegar at the bottom of the glass.

A whole nation laughing at a man with a monkey up his ass. Ah, to be young!

*

My laptop's on-board keyboard has ceased communicating with my computer; not that my computer can tell! I finally had a spare minute to meander into the public library so I could uplink to a terminal and gain access to the mainframe. That's why I haven't been updating. On the first day, when hope still shone brightly, I thought to myself "perhaps I just won't post every thirteenth day. I'll be like a hotel. but with my blog. a superstition that will ensure that on the day that I die, it will be on my day off. whoa boy. let me think about other stuff, like the exact, flavorful timbre of the pain and agitation that arises when one types on a keyboard and nothing happens. let me think about that till I experience vertigo and lose all sense of time."

That paragraph was a product of not being able to type sentences for such a lengthy span! The pleasure I am deriving from this unfortunate second-party peripheral keyboard could not be more complete if it were explicitly designed to stimulate my erogenous zones--by someone who knew how to design keyboards.

So, I do not know when the next time I'll be able to post will be. The universe is unpredictable but reliably cruel, my situation precarious, and my time much demanded. But I will make efforts, do you hear, mighty efforts in order to fill the mute blankness of this text field and add my worthless din to the violent ululation that is the world wide web. I shall not burden myself with the regret of losing my daily streak so soon and so simply, but look only forward, as befits dignity. But I do apologize for these circumstances.

Hopefully by the time I write next I will, for example, have had time to finish Bruce Almighty. I didn't even get as far as Steve Carell acting like a lunatic because he's a puppet trapped in a nightmare. What a crazy guy!

Try to have fun today, everybody. Even if some asshole at the library computer area types so loud a baby starts to cry and a postdoc student drives a long steel nail into his own kneecap, such is his impotent, emasculated rage.


--JL

#12

II.

Habit becomes conviction, conviction becomes passion, and in passion, vocation becomes illuminated. Our vocations determine our paths; in this case, with hilarious literality.

The fastest I've ever walked a mile in a straight line is between seven and eight minutes, which is only a little slower than I can run one. The furthest I've ever walked in a day is somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-five to forty-five miles. The type of walking is important context--one can place different value per mile depending on city traversal, country miles, mixed terrain, footing, load, humidity, altitude, and depending on adverse conditions, which can place us in the five to fifteen mile range when reckoning my more hardcore walks. The coldest temperatures I have ever dealt with on a walk were about negative fourteen degrees Celsius with negative thirty on the wind chill. The hottest day I've walked was about forty degrees. 

The high temperature was in the desert, east of Qatar. The lowest was right here at home. In Massachusetts I "walked" up an eighty-five degree grade, and in the Andes and in the Porcupine Mountains I carefully slid sideways down a similar slopes. In jungle, desert, swamp, cloud forest, cliff country, scrub, cities, suburbs, steppes, strips, railroad tracks, in unknown towns and neighborhoods and hundreds of times along the same haunts and pounds and efficient courses. O, to achieve as many more of my artless, scruffy, meandering walks in as many strange and wonderful places as I have the luck and wherewithal to reach in my limited wandering upon this wide and sacred Earth! 

I've walked with about a dozen different CD players and iPods, wearing a heaping variety of earbuds and regular little plastic headphones and big heavy noise-canceling wraparounds, wearing many years worth of messenger bags and backpacks crammed full over a lifetime of lugging the most absurd crap and cruft and enough loose sheets of paper to fill the winds of hurricane. Dozens of shoes and boots have been walked to pieces. I've needlessly carried trumpets, tubas, bass guitars, bags of books, athletic duffels full of gear, folders full of papers or paperback books tucked under one arm, simply to avoid a ride and walk instead--with a busted knee, with broken ribs, with smashed toes, in spite of migraines, through colds, in frightening fog, soaking rain, incredible stenches, driving winds loaded with particulate or shrieking, dangerous levels of noise, through clouds of midges and plagues of mosquitoes and streaking insanities of black flies, through long grass and close brush, weaving through dense copses far from the beaten path and standing out alone against the sky on a naked ridge, splashing through a ford or tripping across a bridge or balancing along a log over a creek. Alone and in the company of a whole biography of ghosts, and alone.

Thoughts come to you from different angles, old ways blooming into new improbabilities and gleaming realizations plunging like stars into the depths of your own unsounded knowledge. The way opens you up to insights and ideas that one cannot acquire unless one is afoot and plunging ahead, mindful without mind of the breath in the lungs and the wind and the sky. The sight and sound of all the birds and beasts and human persons and all the other living things and the inorganic bedrock and constructed scaffolding, all the angles and vectors and trajectories and fractals; all the new avenues to understanding the world you all walk through together, transforming one another, day after day. And the highest of all, the loss of self, the pure forgetfulness, the being caught up in the undifferentiated glory of creation, the infinite God within breathing coeval with the infinite God without, all boundaries sundered, all veils parted.

You never remember, because memory can't hold it. You can't say what you learn, because it is something you know, and knew, and will always know, and this knowledge is held in kind with knowledge held in the hearts of every soul that ever lived, but it isn't anything words can compass or draw into the world of symbols, because it isn't singular knowledge and it isn't interchangeable, but infinite, immutable, and absolutely silent.

Whispers of it make it into the songs that well up inside you, if you're lucky. You try to put it into the way you hold the people you love, when you're lucky enough to hold them. Into the heart you love in common. The best of your prayers. 



--JL

#11

Eleven is my favorite number. Seven is my second favorite. Then, combinations of the two. It's very rewarding. You see these numbers a lot. My favorite letter is L. When was the last time I watched Sesame Street? I learned about Jim Henson's death from organ dysfunction the age of seven, seven years after the fact. Eleven years later, I turned eighteen, which I remember feeling extremely irrevocable. When the numbers are attached to fictional characters it feels very special, like in Halo and Stranger Things.

There's ads now, I think, on this blog. They're authorized for sure. Have you read my books? They can be found where the browser will take you after clicking upon this hypertext.

Here's a little stuff about things.

*

I.

Walking is something of a point with me. As a child I had some problems with my heart and lungs. One of the only competent doctors I have ever met thought they would be ameliorated and probably eliminated by getting me out of the hammocks, beds, and chairs I favored in my pursuit of quiet, eyes-and-brain-based activities and spend a few afternoons or mornings a week walking up mountains. 

I kind of resented this because I was very into spending all, every second, each available component and section of my free time reading. It's already amazing how much stuff takes time away from reading, so traipsing up and down a mountain didn't seem like a good investment to me. I only ever felt lukewarm about it. But my cardiopulmonary system worked itself out, right as rain.

When I got to middle school--leaving the age of eleven behind--my feelings underwent a transformation deeply colored by a full immersion into the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien. In advance of the Jackson films, which to me and to my best friend looked like the consummation of all human wishes in one glorious triad, I reread The Hobbit and gnawed my way through the rest of his works, cracking every bone I could grab to lick gratefully at the precious marrow. I repeat this process every year, happier than an earthworm in biodynamic compost. To me this is a sublime condition and the truest form of earthly joy.

I got into the habit of taking advantage of excuses to shoulder my backpack meaningfully and start walking the three miles from the school to my house. Only after school to head for home, and only on, say, half-days, or under exceptional weather conditions, at first, as I felt safer riding the bus, which was also faster. I always carried as many books as my backpack would hold, and tried my best to maintain good posture with it always--as dwarves make light of burdens. 

Habit forms itself, sometimes. Almost against my will I would seize opportunities to walk the long way, to refuse rides and instead find out how long it would take to walk home from the movie theater, or the other high school, or the downtown haunts, or the Chinese place where I got my first real taxable job. Before that I was a paperboy, a job which allowed for a good deal of walking, but I lost this gig to a forty-year old dad when the Great Recession started to really pinch.

Walking home from parties, from the arcade, from the park, from the library, from wherever I had walked to or been driven to. During snowstorms, on days when the streets were mottled, inch-thick ice and the icicles hung hung four feet long all along the power lines and snapped great branches from strong trees. Three-inch crust over the three feet of wet packing snow where the blowers don't churn and spit. On days when old folks don't leave their house and the parents only let their kids out for a half hour before they have to come in from a break 'cause the heat's so pure and fierce a dog might go insane and leap at a dumpster so hard it leaves big smears of tacky blood on it. At two forty-five in the morning, full of beer and singing aloud. From a little after sunup to a couple hours after sunset, and barely able to walk at all the next day, using my hands as much as my feet on the stairs. 

I remember this guy I went to school with rolling up in his mom's minivan one evening when I was walking home after wrestling practice. The snow and sleet were falling so thick you had to wipe a crust off your forehead and eyebrows and soaking, crusted eyelids and frozen eyelashes and the feet slid in long runnels of gray puddly slush and gave back ground on slick patches of stubborn freeze under the liquefaction. He rolled up and offered me shelter in his warm dry van and I told him, through a face gone numb and clumsy with chilled blood, no, I'm good, you're good, I'm almost home. I remember the look on his face as he nodded a little, his mouth a little open, a tiny little frown. He didn't look away from me as he pulled off, his eyes not hurt, not confused exactly, but uncomprehending, not processing. And over time I have found that people do not actually believe me, and think that I am lying, when I say how much I prefer to walk, when I describe how much I walk, under what conditions.

*

Tomorrow, more on this subject, which shall settle it for a long time coming.


--JL

#10

My thoughts on the current political situation? It's like that episode of Invader Zim. You know the one. With the turkey. 

I don't have the kind of taste in fonts that would allow me to derive self-importance from it, but I was thinking it would be kind of fun to see how hard it would be to make my own. Something sensible and honest, but perhaps just a burnish with a clean chamois on the smoothness index, careful not to lose any trust. 

Hope that was good font-talk. Peace, sympathetic maniacs.


--JL

#9

It is extremely difficult to tell the truth about women without sounding like the kind of prick that talks about women the way miners talk about their ore of expertise: a slim, practically nonexistent vein of something worth everything, surrounded by an incalculable tonnage of worthless, dangerous bullshit; stuff that'll kill you just because you're there.

Ah, well.

I guess sometimes all there is to say is what you get for changing your entire life around because another organism really thought it would be best is:

• No more of the stuff that convinced you it was a normal idea to act like such a fool in the first place. 
• Being told three ways you're an idiot and an asshole before you even have breakfast in your mouth.

No matter how hard I work or how carefully I lay out boundaries, the scene iterates with each particular firmly in place: I get clear of a woman and start working on my head and getting used to the space. A woman comes along with all this hope and energy and undeniable life force. Ere long, half of everything is hers, the other half was a stupid idea and really ought to be got rid of if it ain't already gone, all my money's spent, my friends have changed their phone numbers, and getting yelled at is a daily appointment I keep without fail. This persists until, maddened and near catatonia, I break up with her. She cries so hard I think the cops will come. Bit by careful bit, I get clear, start working on my head, getting used to the space. A woman comes along.

Ladies, if you please. Instead of going around looking so damn fine and having so much smart stuff to say, you could instead stab me in the chest, just shove a blade right up into the old body cavity. This technique is known as The Shortcut; young men may misread it as antipathy, but I will thank you with my dying breath and any male witnesses who have been around the block a couple of times will nod sagely, tip their weathered hats, and respect you as an honest woman.


--JL

#8

People make much of the news cycle, but a long time ago I read that the best indicator of what is actually happening in real-time is the very simple Fire Index: If you look around, and nothing is on fire, it is a good news day. If there are fires, and you can see them, the news day is bad. There is no other worthwhile metric. Credit to one Mr. J. Wigu--once a purveyor of the finest available graphic idea-vehicles, now a wretched and spineless chief executive officer for a perfectly self-sufficient materiel generator.

Another hero of mine now sells high-quality soda that left coast scumyups mix with nettle vodka some dude I went to high school with who squats in Detroit now makes in a row of oil drums and siphons into freecycled bongs decorated with factory-irregular hologram stickers, "subcutaneously" "marketed" by nomadic teenagers as "kaleidoscope notka". Another is sitting in an unpaid-for room on a pile of unsold books, completely out of their fucking minds, convinced they are some sort of Impeccable Thought Emperor. Yet another straight-up died of health complications, and no one ever said a single solitary word about it that I could find.

Of course, death is inevitable, and it is a cold hard fact that you are free to seek whatever happiness you can snatch from life, so a tip of the flask for the pavement and a burning salute to everybody in this blog post.


Successful or not, everyone merely gets older and worse before the common end. This is why I secretly bury copies of everything I write on private property in the dead of night, disguising the coordinates as fragments of riddles squirreled away in ancient English abbeys, crediting everything to various imaginary rappers, known collectively as the Ghost Hands Crew.

In the amnesiac maelstrom of human history, the key aftereffect of a notable life is to have irrevocably messed with the generally accepted data.


--JL

#7

Been catching up on the philosophy blogs. Very different than flipping through the digital sheaf of paleontology blogs with a steaming cup of imaginary tea at my elbow and the poetry of the newest scientific names playing across my daydream, or the champagne-bubble multi-tier mega-high of the astrophysics blogs. More like shoving a nitro-cold brew IV needle into my left tear duct and watching people who didn't hear about Aristotle until college writhe their way out of their translucent egg chambers, slippery with the latest discursive fashions. The price of having one's game up to par.

This thing, exhumed by chance, is the most stimulating thing I read on the web all summer, and it is sixteen years old. Things uploaded to the internet during this frontier period have a certain prescience to them, I find, and this is a prime example.


--JL

#6

Quit my job today. It's the fastest I ever quit any job, and it sucks because it was sort of an upscale kitchen and the money was decent and about to get hot since I'd put a good foot forward but one little thing seemed to threaten old problems from old kitchens and yesterday I went and had a bona-fide ticker-pumpin' panic attack. 

Being unable to breathe, wide scared eyes unable to fully process what they see as they roll involuntarily inside the skull and hands trembling so you can't drive a car is what's known as a clear message from the body to ditch out on the scene. So one shitty conversation later I gotta hit the pavement again.

I have to say it cold fucking bites to ditch this way. The kitchen was busy and you could lose yourself in the hard mess real easy and the people were fine to get along with and it was good impressions all around. The kind of place you could see sinking a few years into, like I usually do. They were talking about moving me up, putting me on the line, all very heartening.

But that's what wrecked my nerves, I guess, is sticking around scenes whose value long since bit the dust. And I can't say I haven't heard opening love songs from people that ended up screwing me over. Can't fall into that again, taking abuse for months up to years without doing anything about it. Better tragically early than traumatically late. 

Anyway, can't dwell on it. Time to switch industries, is the takeaway. Tuesday I'll go talk to some old coworkers who have the arrangement more under their purview and should be able to sweeten up a homecoming for me. They look like they're desperate for hands, and I know the deck. 


--JL

#5

Cresting the fifth of these little wrestling matches between me and a text field comes with a strong feeling of clarity. I feel as though I've got my sleeves rolled up, now. I like having my sleeves rolled up, generally speaking. 

Early this spring I decided to write a play. I thought it might be a fun way to pass the time and I was living with a fully articulated and actively working person of the theater who was amenable to new and untried works. I came over all cock of the walk about generating a play for him, filled both of our heads with high-concept nonsense, and spent the summer not writing the play I had imagined but something else entirely. The original play is now closer to being a type of computer program, and I have a lot of notes about procedurally generated content. Creation is a tricky business, and one reason I rarely work with others is my very tenuous grip on the steering mechanism.

The second play, which is my first play, is ninety percent complete and shall be the third book I make, to be available as a product for consumption no later than the first of October.

I never meant to write a play, as a younger man. Didn't think I ever would. Thought I had no reason to write a play. Perhaps I still haven't; took no consultation on this project. This is how I am. Plunging onto a course plotted on a guess and an instinct. No compass, no goal, no explanation for why I've done what I've done; already working on the next thing.

--JL