Ha, it's Halloween night! I bet no one's going to read the post today. On the Eve which belongs to all the Hallows, people like to get shitfaced or sugarsick, maybe watch a scary movie or several. Reading something that is only sort of scary to people with sesquipedalophobia is not typically the favored activity.
No, the wild thing about Hallows 'Een is the fervor and ubiquity of fucking busting out, en masse--the closest Americans ever let themselves get to the Feast of Fools (apart from in, you know, politics), and everybody parties in some form or another. It's the costuming, the almost indescribable and truly frightening power of wearing and witnessing costumes and masks.
For many people, Halloween is the definitive holiday, the true-self holiday, the holiday that pays off without needing anything put in that isn't fun and sexy and totemically empowering. To wear a mask, forget yourself, and revel--is there anything more human? Ha, only trying to censor and destroy the whole thing--which is, of course, that sort of person's idea of a party. This too, is very American. I love this blessed country and its incredible, sometimes mind-wrenching contradictions.
I'm sitting at home in my pajamas, of course. I hate it all. I like typing, alone, in regular clothes appropriate to the time and setting. Or in the nude, if it's summer and I'm alone. Someday I might be as crazy as Percy Aldridge Grainger and write naked in the middle of winter with the window open and who cares if anyone's watching, but for now, I wear pants most of the time. At least underwear.
Sociologically I think of Halloween as a plus (sublimation, the self-exploration provided by roleplay, the eruptions and gatherings of repurposed shamanism, people getting laid sometimes the one time all year), and anthropologically I find it fascinating, but I hate participating. I like high-quality chocolates and the sampling of new and untasted confections very much, but I have come to deplore mass-produced candies, and even as a kid my haul would last me weeks--what wouldn't go into the trash. My social life is made up of coworkers I rarely if ever see outside of work. I no longer drink. There's no little kids in my life right now. I hate wearing masks, because I am naturally the sort of person who disappears behind the mask and I do not like losing myself to a fetish. Dark roads lead to dark places; I don't gamble or do cocaine because of similar fears and feelings, and if a woman asks me to hit her, I don't do that either, no matter how hot she assures me it will make her. Same for anyone I might be fooling around with.
So you see, from a personal perspective, I have nothing to gain these days, and believe that by and large, little good comes of the types of partying that typifies Halloween. I like ghost stories and horror a great deal, but I get my fill all the year round when the mood takes me; I don't really need a special day. It's like Christmas or my birthday; the point of these things is presents for a kid, but I have purchasing power, so I could give a fuck about getting some presents. I want my family around me, voices raised in song and laughter, and the occasion to feast. In this instance, I'm going to lie in bed and think about the veil between the worlds for a while.
What I am trying to get at, in the end, is that I hope people take care of each other out there. Don't lose sight of the people you love. Don't be heedless in the scrum to get intoxicated. Have fun, but remember who you are behind the mask.
Godspeed, friends, and if you have a moment, as it is indeed Samhain and All Saint's Eve and the beginning of Allhallowtide--memento mori, memento mortuis. Light a candle.
--JL
Wednesday, October 31, 2018
Tuesday, October 30, 2018
#50
Hey, fifty! Or, L.
*
Look, this fucking hawk took a rabbit right by the sidewalk on my way home from work, right by a busy street. Nevertheless, it chose to stand its ground right where it was, and I was thirty feet away. It allowed me to approach to a distance of less than ten feet, and when I had been there for about forty seconds, it began to feed, in spite of me and in spite of the flow of cars and occasional cyclist whizzing past us.
Oh, she was a big girl. Cooper's, size of a young bald eagle, eyes a modest orbit but a very attractive pale gold, small beak with an elegant hook, very large and well-formed legs, the talons comparatively small and graceful, very attractive chocolate and loam on the dark feathers and a clean white on the legs, more of cream on the belly and speckled breast. I'd never before seen a cooper, or any other hawk, feeding from so close. It was absolutely remarkable, not least because she let me get even closer without interrupting her regular, peaceable tearing at flesh and gut and bone.
After a while the rumbling approach of a bus seemed to change her attitude. She made ready and winged away with her kill between her talons, and when I saw her take wing, I realized her posture had not been forbearance for my rude proximity or fearlessness in the face of the traffic. It was grim resignation, only undertaken to lighten the carcass if possible before attempting to change to a safer and more private location. It had clearly been more likely in her mind that I would snatch her kill for my ape's cooking pot, or some other creature would, or that I would attack her for no reason at all, and finally that noisy giant monsters were like to kill her at any moment.
At any rate, she was able to fly--oh! So beautifully, such a wingspan, such a beat, and what strength and energy and courage, inarguable courage this time, this attempt, this heroic! But it all went cocks-up.
The hawk winged down the small grassy slope leading to a parking lot. It was just at this moment that a black van chose to roll down the parking lot towards the street at the bottom of the hill, screwing up her flight path and forcing her to veer and waste energy trying to gain height early--and it could not possibly have come at a worse time. An ambulance came chugging up the street past the parking lot, and the hawk's trajectory and momentum would doubtlessly have taken her straight into its path.
She immediately dropped her kill, so hard-won, for which she must have been so hungry and on which there remained plenty of sustenance, and flared hard and fast, angling into the sharpest stoop I have ever seen achieved, just a few degrees shy of ninety. For a flashing fraction of a second she was no more than a brown-and-cream brushstroke over a still photograph of the scene, a blurred motion line.
Banking, either to the left or right, might have been the smarter maneuver. The high corner of the ambulance smacked her with a sound that made me shove my fingers in my mouth and curse savagely around them, but she fluttered into a nearby tree under her own power, and when I made my way down there--I'd lost sight of her in the leaves--she wasn't in the tree, on the ground, or the bushes, so she saved herself from the deadly or maiming effects of a true collision. The rabbit lay where she had left it, half-eaten, and the cars had rolled on without pause or comment.
It was pretty fucking crazy, all in all.
*
I had an idea of what to write that wasn't to do with hawks, and I liked it enough that I was going to do it, but man, I'd promised and promised about the dang hawk and it had been days. So there you have the story of that hawk I saw, and I've forgotten the other thing, which happens a lot if I don't jot down my ideas in bullet points before I start elaborating on any single one. Perhaps it will come back to me, someday, and the timing will be such that I am able to type it into this text field.
*
It's funny. Now that people aren't trying to shove it down my throat and judge me metrically based on my ability to perform it on command, algebra seems fun as hell. That's just how I am. I ruined my life several times over based on saying fuck the Man, that old Master, and regret nothing. Algebra didn't go anywhere, and you always, always,
always
ALWAYS
say fuck you to the Master, actually sucker-punch him in his stupid gut and moron face, and when he says that His Order is for Your Good and also for Everyone Else's Good, the GREATER Good, you fucking slit his pig throat for him and pull his filthy forked deceiver's tongue out the aperture.
Remember, the Master is a metaphorical un-man, and what you do to him is figurative! Except for saying "fuck you", because fuck the Man, dude. Fuck that guy and everyone that wants to be him. I love peace, and never seek violent solutions, but fuck the Man. Screw that fucking guy.
*
That wasn't that thing from before. I just wanted to come out with zero prevarication or chance to misinterpret the fact that I am against the Man, and everything he stands for. Fuck him, actually.
--JL
*
Look, this fucking hawk took a rabbit right by the sidewalk on my way home from work, right by a busy street. Nevertheless, it chose to stand its ground right where it was, and I was thirty feet away. It allowed me to approach to a distance of less than ten feet, and when I had been there for about forty seconds, it began to feed, in spite of me and in spite of the flow of cars and occasional cyclist whizzing past us.
Oh, she was a big girl. Cooper's, size of a young bald eagle, eyes a modest orbit but a very attractive pale gold, small beak with an elegant hook, very large and well-formed legs, the talons comparatively small and graceful, very attractive chocolate and loam on the dark feathers and a clean white on the legs, more of cream on the belly and speckled breast. I'd never before seen a cooper, or any other hawk, feeding from so close. It was absolutely remarkable, not least because she let me get even closer without interrupting her regular, peaceable tearing at flesh and gut and bone.
After a while the rumbling approach of a bus seemed to change her attitude. She made ready and winged away with her kill between her talons, and when I saw her take wing, I realized her posture had not been forbearance for my rude proximity or fearlessness in the face of the traffic. It was grim resignation, only undertaken to lighten the carcass if possible before attempting to change to a safer and more private location. It had clearly been more likely in her mind that I would snatch her kill for my ape's cooking pot, or some other creature would, or that I would attack her for no reason at all, and finally that noisy giant monsters were like to kill her at any moment.
At any rate, she was able to fly--oh! So beautifully, such a wingspan, such a beat, and what strength and energy and courage, inarguable courage this time, this attempt, this heroic! But it all went cocks-up.
The hawk winged down the small grassy slope leading to a parking lot. It was just at this moment that a black van chose to roll down the parking lot towards the street at the bottom of the hill, screwing up her flight path and forcing her to veer and waste energy trying to gain height early--and it could not possibly have come at a worse time. An ambulance came chugging up the street past the parking lot, and the hawk's trajectory and momentum would doubtlessly have taken her straight into its path.
She immediately dropped her kill, so hard-won, for which she must have been so hungry and on which there remained plenty of sustenance, and flared hard and fast, angling into the sharpest stoop I have ever seen achieved, just a few degrees shy of ninety. For a flashing fraction of a second she was no more than a brown-and-cream brushstroke over a still photograph of the scene, a blurred motion line.
Banking, either to the left or right, might have been the smarter maneuver. The high corner of the ambulance smacked her with a sound that made me shove my fingers in my mouth and curse savagely around them, but she fluttered into a nearby tree under her own power, and when I made my way down there--I'd lost sight of her in the leaves--she wasn't in the tree, on the ground, or the bushes, so she saved herself from the deadly or maiming effects of a true collision. The rabbit lay where she had left it, half-eaten, and the cars had rolled on without pause or comment.
It was pretty fucking crazy, all in all.
*
I had an idea of what to write that wasn't to do with hawks, and I liked it enough that I was going to do it, but man, I'd promised and promised about the dang hawk and it had been days. So there you have the story of that hawk I saw, and I've forgotten the other thing, which happens a lot if I don't jot down my ideas in bullet points before I start elaborating on any single one. Perhaps it will come back to me, someday, and the timing will be such that I am able to type it into this text field.
*
It's funny. Now that people aren't trying to shove it down my throat and judge me metrically based on my ability to perform it on command, algebra seems fun as hell. That's just how I am. I ruined my life several times over based on saying fuck the Man, that old Master, and regret nothing. Algebra didn't go anywhere, and you always, always,
always
ALWAYS
say fuck you to the Master, actually sucker-punch him in his stupid gut and moron face, and when he says that His Order is for Your Good and also for Everyone Else's Good, the GREATER Good, you fucking slit his pig throat for him and pull his filthy forked deceiver's tongue out the aperture.
Remember, the Master is a metaphorical un-man, and what you do to him is figurative! Except for saying "fuck you", because fuck the Man, dude. Fuck that guy and everyone that wants to be him. I love peace, and never seek violent solutions, but fuck the Man. Screw that fucking guy.
*
That wasn't that thing from before. I just wanted to come out with zero prevarication or chance to misinterpret the fact that I am against the Man, and everything he stands for. Fuck him, actually.
--JL
Monday, October 29, 2018
#49
Hey, guess what? I had to work another double! I am absolutely in love with gainful employment. Satisfaction and thrills abound.
Okay, so really, I am--I didn't have anything better to do today, except for read and write, and in order to read, write, and maintain my body so I can continue to read and write, I must work. I've worked a mighty scroll of shitty hours, and I've worked a respectable quantity of great hours and hours somewhere in between, and I've gotten to where what used to be a shitty hour is perfectly fine (this difference is entirely mental) but no matter how good you get at keeping your energy up and your core self centered in focus, working a double because someone called off has a particular flavor. The flavor is bullshit, and the duration of a shift provides ample time to savor.
Of course, this is not a criticism of work, is it, really? Nope. Ah, but without other people, there is no work. Indeed, one of life's inescapable fuck yous is that you cannot live it without giving people every opportunity every single day to let you down. And baby, they will take it. Oh, they will seize it like a bright brass ring. Their aim will be true, and their grip sure.
It happens with such regularity, in fact, that I've given up bearing anyone any ill will over such things. I have come to accept that there are people who come into work regularly, and on time. Other people will choose different ways. The former will pick up the latter's slack. Someday the sun will swallow this lifeless planet, in grim repayment for all the life it once rained down.
--JL
Okay, so really, I am--I didn't have anything better to do today, except for read and write, and in order to read, write, and maintain my body so I can continue to read and write, I must work. I've worked a mighty scroll of shitty hours, and I've worked a respectable quantity of great hours and hours somewhere in between, and I've gotten to where what used to be a shitty hour is perfectly fine (this difference is entirely mental) but no matter how good you get at keeping your energy up and your core self centered in focus, working a double because someone called off has a particular flavor. The flavor is bullshit, and the duration of a shift provides ample time to savor.
Of course, this is not a criticism of work, is it, really? Nope. Ah, but without other people, there is no work. Indeed, one of life's inescapable fuck yous is that you cannot live it without giving people every opportunity every single day to let you down. And baby, they will take it. Oh, they will seize it like a bright brass ring. Their aim will be true, and their grip sure.
It happens with such regularity, in fact, that I've given up bearing anyone any ill will over such things. I have come to accept that there are people who come into work regularly, and on time. Other people will choose different ways. The former will pick up the latter's slack. Someday the sun will swallow this lifeless planet, in grim repayment for all the life it once rained down.
--JL
Sunday, October 28, 2018
#48
A lot of people have been dying (starvation, illness, fucking wackjobs), which brings a man down, and I'm very tired (had to work a surprise double yesterday and come in to open today) so this is sort of a weekend off. Probably I will tell you about more hawks tomorrow, but if I don't, I dunno, man. Life is crazy. I don't have to apologize. One can only punch so many clocks, and this blog has not bought me so much as a sandwich.
Should you truly find yourself unable to make do without fresh writing, you could always read my books. Soon there will be more, but the two that are there are perfectly reasonable. Read them already? Check back for hidden cheats and secrets!
Should you truly find yourself unable to make do without fresh writing, you could always read my books. Soon there will be more, but the two that are there are perfectly reasonable. Read them already? Check back for hidden cheats and secrets!
--JL
Friday, October 26, 2018
#47
The first hawk was gliding just a couple feet above the treetops, in a place where they reach at each other over a road going up a steep hill, so I was looking up at the bird as though standing in a sharply-cut gully with a river running through it. It was so rounded in the head in its flight, its wings so stubbed and its body so fluffed, tail spread wide and all so creamy white and pale underneath that I thought it was a Cooper's until it lazily banked to the right and the sun flared russet through the tail.
*
More hawks...tomorrow! I gotta do it, sorry folks. I wrote the second parts of this post first, like a fool, and now it's gone and gotten late and I gotta work in the morning. Well, by all means, you have every right to leave in a huff, but, pray, if you can find it in your heart to forgive an idiotic man, read on.
*
Funny. I have long believed myself a person who had seasoned into the kind of individual that is quick to absolve others of their trespasses against me. That I was good at forgiving, and have in fact been known for it. This last season of my life has cut deep enough that I find myself in the midst of a flood of rotten but still recognizable grudges floating up around me, and I find myself with new teeth to bite into their sodden, long-buried flesh.
Fuck be upon it! So I'm not as nice as I thought I'd forced myself to become, and lash out like any beast when wounded. Nothing for it but to savor the flavor and try to move on. Steps, time, etc. Every ten shifts, I walk a hundred miles. I have all the time I could possibly want.
*
It just struck me, as I listen to a particular song through headphones for the very first time, that I will never again so long as I may live hear this particular song through the speakers of my old car. I did not miss my old car till just now, when my heart was pierced as though by a thousand bitter spears.
Life! Ha!
----------> BOOKS <------------
--JL
*
More hawks...tomorrow! I gotta do it, sorry folks. I wrote the second parts of this post first, like a fool, and now it's gone and gotten late and I gotta work in the morning. Well, by all means, you have every right to leave in a huff, but, pray, if you can find it in your heart to forgive an idiotic man, read on.
*
Funny. I have long believed myself a person who had seasoned into the kind of individual that is quick to absolve others of their trespasses against me. That I was good at forgiving, and have in fact been known for it. This last season of my life has cut deep enough that I find myself in the midst of a flood of rotten but still recognizable grudges floating up around me, and I find myself with new teeth to bite into their sodden, long-buried flesh.
Fuck be upon it! So I'm not as nice as I thought I'd forced myself to become, and lash out like any beast when wounded. Nothing for it but to savor the flavor and try to move on. Steps, time, etc. Every ten shifts, I walk a hundred miles. I have all the time I could possibly want.
*
It just struck me, as I listen to a particular song through headphones for the very first time, that I will never again so long as I may live hear this particular song through the speakers of my old car. I did not miss my old car till just now, when my heart was pierced as though by a thousand bitter spears.
Life! Ha!
----------> BOOKS <------------
--JL
Thursday, October 25, 2018
#46
Saw so many great birds in between getting up from typing last time I wrote a post and sitting down to type one now. Let me tell you about some.
I saw a really great blue jay. I saw several merely great blue jays in flight, from below, their distinctive dippy sort of slow flap they use when they're just cruisin' and their palest gray, wonderfully expansive bellies--all very well in order, but without a better look at the whole bird, you can't get a sense of what you're really dealing with. The really great one was much nearer me, in a tree; a most pert little fellow. Full-grown youngster with a slight, sharp build, very sunny sky-colored blues, a tall crest, a short dark beak and comically round and large of eye. He called loudly at swift intervals, as if to banter, and hopped about freely.
*
You know what? I'm extremely tired. I am an early bird, ha-ha. I'll tell you about the hawks tomorrow. It'll be rad, you won't wanna miss it.
Peace, horse dogg maniacs
--JL
I saw a really great blue jay. I saw several merely great blue jays in flight, from below, their distinctive dippy sort of slow flap they use when they're just cruisin' and their palest gray, wonderfully expansive bellies--all very well in order, but without a better look at the whole bird, you can't get a sense of what you're really dealing with. The really great one was much nearer me, in a tree; a most pert little fellow. Full-grown youngster with a slight, sharp build, very sunny sky-colored blues, a tall crest, a short dark beak and comically round and large of eye. He called loudly at swift intervals, as if to banter, and hopped about freely.
*
You know what? I'm extremely tired. I am an early bird, ha-ha. I'll tell you about the hawks tomorrow. It'll be rad, you won't wanna miss it.
Peace, horse dogg maniacs
--JL
Tuesday, October 23, 2018
#45
Strictly unimpressed by "comics" that are just hand-drawn memes. That is a concession for artist and humorist both. If you make shit like that, it is like making sprite comics, or political cartoons. Truly. There is nothing wrong with you, but the future won't give the tenth part of a fuck about your buried and forgotten nega-creativity.
Plus you suck now, today. Make a fucking layout. Take a long moment, and pretend your audience isn't a writhing pile of crabs and lobsters.
What's that? "You don't even make comics, Joseph! Fuck you. You draw like an idiot." Well, that's as may be. I suck too, but opinions are free.
*
The window of my room faces west. My childhood apartment room's window faced north. I'm one of those people that can work and look out the window in equal measure, and for that I count myself lucky. One informs the other in a magnificent flow.
I love to work. With my hands, with my eyes, with my mind, feet, tongue, whatever. And I love to be absolutely still and do nothing at all, not so much as think. Churning dynamo, bright blank. If I can be both of these things in a day, then I don't know what more to ask from life.
As states, the two have an astonishing amount in common. When I am hardest at work, typing most furiously or managing a knife with all the skill I have managed to accumulate or tending to a stovetop's worth of six-quart pots, there is a stillness and quiet at my center, where my breath whispers down to a liquid--I run all to nothing, just a fluidity behind a machine which manipulates the world of tools and symbols in front of it with gestures of an absoluteness and a surety that becomes transcendental. Doing and thinking are one, and then narrow to a vanishing-point. You can't stay there for very long; there simply isn't enough to do, or something goes wrong, or your body cries out for something and brings you back.
When I have stilled and quieted every nerve and every need to move a muscle and relaxed my physical vision and my conscious stream into a diffuseness, I lift off. The body once again is gone, only rather than transforming into fluid it becomes instead a socket, something vestigial to be slipped back into at another moment--after the wild untethering reaches its conclusion, either organically as embodiment reasserts itself, some insight or dream draws me back into analysis, or because someone, like my mom, is snapping their fingers in my face or yelling for attention. Or some other environmental interruption, like sudden rain or approaching enemies. The body always has its say--till it doesn't, eh?
Both states have much about them that relegates and perhaps even deprives the senses. Both alter embodiment and psychic activity. One transports literally and the other does not. One has practical applications in terms of being-in-the-world, especially socially, and the other perhaps does as well, but to assert such is to enter treacherous ground and philosophical obscurity. Although, the sort of soft-headed all-encompassing bullshitosophy that delights in absorbing and perverting liminality and currently informs so much talk and thought and decision in the world today does demonstrate more of a tolerance for claims that thought alone is sufficient cause to justify existence and propagation of further existence, if only to make a quick dollar out of it.
The latter state has come naturally to me ever since I was a child, but it took me a long time to be able to find work in anything that wasn't writing. Working in kitchens, I realize more and more, was a very lucky find for me. The work is perfect, and feeding people has meaning, a quality I crave like oxygen.
I also have a prodigious ludic appetite, with its corresponding hyperfocus state. Moments of concentration so absolute that I remember them more as dreams than actual events. I know I am aging because I have come to prefer the thrill of getting up extremely early to go work very hard over kicking back and playing some games.
*
It's my day off. I'm getting this out of the way early so I can work on writing I care about in a different way; not to say this blog is not important to me, but it is not books, after all. I put a deal more effort into those, and I hope it shows. Do me a favor and find out, huh?
--JL
Plus you suck now, today. Make a fucking layout. Take a long moment, and pretend your audience isn't a writhing pile of crabs and lobsters.
What's that? "You don't even make comics, Joseph! Fuck you. You draw like an idiot." Well, that's as may be. I suck too, but opinions are free.
*
The window of my room faces west. My childhood apartment room's window faced north. I'm one of those people that can work and look out the window in equal measure, and for that I count myself lucky. One informs the other in a magnificent flow.
I love to work. With my hands, with my eyes, with my mind, feet, tongue, whatever. And I love to be absolutely still and do nothing at all, not so much as think. Churning dynamo, bright blank. If I can be both of these things in a day, then I don't know what more to ask from life.
As states, the two have an astonishing amount in common. When I am hardest at work, typing most furiously or managing a knife with all the skill I have managed to accumulate or tending to a stovetop's worth of six-quart pots, there is a stillness and quiet at my center, where my breath whispers down to a liquid--I run all to nothing, just a fluidity behind a machine which manipulates the world of tools and symbols in front of it with gestures of an absoluteness and a surety that becomes transcendental. Doing and thinking are one, and then narrow to a vanishing-point. You can't stay there for very long; there simply isn't enough to do, or something goes wrong, or your body cries out for something and brings you back.
When I have stilled and quieted every nerve and every need to move a muscle and relaxed my physical vision and my conscious stream into a diffuseness, I lift off. The body once again is gone, only rather than transforming into fluid it becomes instead a socket, something vestigial to be slipped back into at another moment--after the wild untethering reaches its conclusion, either organically as embodiment reasserts itself, some insight or dream draws me back into analysis, or because someone, like my mom, is snapping their fingers in my face or yelling for attention. Or some other environmental interruption, like sudden rain or approaching enemies. The body always has its say--till it doesn't, eh?
Both states have much about them that relegates and perhaps even deprives the senses. Both alter embodiment and psychic activity. One transports literally and the other does not. One has practical applications in terms of being-in-the-world, especially socially, and the other perhaps does as well, but to assert such is to enter treacherous ground and philosophical obscurity. Although, the sort of soft-headed all-encompassing bullshitosophy that delights in absorbing and perverting liminality and currently informs so much talk and thought and decision in the world today does demonstrate more of a tolerance for claims that thought alone is sufficient cause to justify existence and propagation of further existence, if only to make a quick dollar out of it.
The latter state has come naturally to me ever since I was a child, but it took me a long time to be able to find work in anything that wasn't writing. Working in kitchens, I realize more and more, was a very lucky find for me. The work is perfect, and feeding people has meaning, a quality I crave like oxygen.
I also have a prodigious ludic appetite, with its corresponding hyperfocus state. Moments of concentration so absolute that I remember them more as dreams than actual events. I know I am aging because I have come to prefer the thrill of getting up extremely early to go work very hard over kicking back and playing some games.
*
It's my day off. I'm getting this out of the way early so I can work on writing I care about in a different way; not to say this blog is not important to me, but it is not books, after all. I put a deal more effort into those, and I hope it shows. Do me a favor and find out, huh?
--JL
Monday, October 22, 2018
#44
Today as I was walking home, I looked to my right into a dense leafy brush, and saw the tip of a squirrel's tail flash tawny in the goldshot murk.
*
Being alone is a fine thing, a needful thing. I like being alone. I like that a great deal. I like it nice and lonesome, and I like lonely places not often trod. I don't like being lonely; no one likes that. I read that being lonely is a problem in the modern world, perhaps a health epidemic. I wondered if perhaps the next article might solemnly inform me that fire burns.
Sticking out like a sore thumb is a more violent form of loneliness. I was never like anyone in my peer group. No one is, not wholly. But there are of course levels to this shit. People have no love for weirdness or outsideness, but they actively dislike intelligent people (exceptions made for people who make them feel as intelligent as they are [usually charlatans on the news]), and they cannot bear imaginative people. I'm not trying to stroke my own dick and I'm not saying this makes people bad; this is just something I have had ample cause to note, since an admixture of these traits is a large part of my experience of selfhood and I have been educated alongside and worked with other people for a lifetime. If you think I'm a normal moron without an imagination, I recommend you read something else, and have no idea why you waited this long to stop.
I was an exceptionally strange kid, a very strange teenager, and have grown into a strange but finally wary man, and people have never been ashamed to let me know all about it. I'm strange enough that people do not mind if they offend me by pointing out how strange I am. That sort of thing is fine with me, though. There are much subtler, much colder and more poisonous ways the loneliness makes itself felt. The apartness.
People's chatter hardly factors. It is the cold membrane between you and the flow of the quotidian and secure that takes its toll. You imagine all sorts of weird shit about yourself, and start to believe it. You start wondering what curse marks your brow.
Puzzling, that people find me strange. I find it a marvel, the stuff about me that they find remarkable and risible. I make utter and absolute sense to myself. If it weren't for public and lifelong assurances to the contrary, I would say that I was the boring one, surrounded by obscurely-motivated, rude, usually angry lunatics.
*
Read my books? You should do it. They might be kind of weird, though.
--JL
*
Being alone is a fine thing, a needful thing. I like being alone. I like that a great deal. I like it nice and lonesome, and I like lonely places not often trod. I don't like being lonely; no one likes that. I read that being lonely is a problem in the modern world, perhaps a health epidemic. I wondered if perhaps the next article might solemnly inform me that fire burns.
Sticking out like a sore thumb is a more violent form of loneliness. I was never like anyone in my peer group. No one is, not wholly. But there are of course levels to this shit. People have no love for weirdness or outsideness, but they actively dislike intelligent people (exceptions made for people who make them feel as intelligent as they are [usually charlatans on the news]), and they cannot bear imaginative people. I'm not trying to stroke my own dick and I'm not saying this makes people bad; this is just something I have had ample cause to note, since an admixture of these traits is a large part of my experience of selfhood and I have been educated alongside and worked with other people for a lifetime. If you think I'm a normal moron without an imagination, I recommend you read something else, and have no idea why you waited this long to stop.
I was an exceptionally strange kid, a very strange teenager, and have grown into a strange but finally wary man, and people have never been ashamed to let me know all about it. I'm strange enough that people do not mind if they offend me by pointing out how strange I am. That sort of thing is fine with me, though. There are much subtler, much colder and more poisonous ways the loneliness makes itself felt. The apartness.
People's chatter hardly factors. It is the cold membrane between you and the flow of the quotidian and secure that takes its toll. You imagine all sorts of weird shit about yourself, and start to believe it. You start wondering what curse marks your brow.
Puzzling, that people find me strange. I find it a marvel, the stuff about me that they find remarkable and risible. I make utter and absolute sense to myself. If it weren't for public and lifelong assurances to the contrary, I would say that I was the boring one, surrounded by obscurely-motivated, rude, usually angry lunatics.
*
Read my books? You should do it. They might be kind of weird, though.
--JL
Sunday, October 21, 2018
#43
Today was unremarkable. Yesterday, too, except I played Settlers of Catan and made tons of jokes. I was relaxed. I joke the most when I'm relaxed. When things are tense, I'm more liable to grit out simple sentences. Anyway, yesterday I hung out with a couple of friends, which is something I don't do very often. I also met drug dealers so efficient and professional they made regular business people look like benumbed jackasses awkwardly knocking over a fence in a confused parody of casually leaning against it.
It is a beautiful evening. The clouds have been first a mellow and then a blazing liquid firegold. Now they are graying, slim rows of elegant little puffs going to ash, with deep pink and bloody dusty russet embers moaning near the horizon, above the last band of gold. The overhead sky is that pale blue that wants to be silver that wants to be young mouse fur.
A migraine woke me up at two in the morning last night. It tortured, nauseated, and plagued me with cold sweats and hot flashes until at three in the morning, I vomited. Then I slept, sort of, brokenly, until five, when I got up for my shift at work. I had quite a good shift. Plenty to do, and I felt perfectly fine to do it. Walked the usual five miles there and five miles back.
Oh! Also, yesterday there was a thunderstorm with lightning and hail! Super keen.
Did you know that I have books available on the Amazon website for their Kindle device? It is eminently so. Simply click the link, and choose between stories made of prose and poems made of poesy. Go on! I know the word poesy, and let myself use it! Does this not tantalize you?
--JL
It is a beautiful evening. The clouds have been first a mellow and then a blazing liquid firegold. Now they are graying, slim rows of elegant little puffs going to ash, with deep pink and bloody dusty russet embers moaning near the horizon, above the last band of gold. The overhead sky is that pale blue that wants to be silver that wants to be young mouse fur.
A migraine woke me up at two in the morning last night. It tortured, nauseated, and plagued me with cold sweats and hot flashes until at three in the morning, I vomited. Then I slept, sort of, brokenly, until five, when I got up for my shift at work. I had quite a good shift. Plenty to do, and I felt perfectly fine to do it. Walked the usual five miles there and five miles back.
Oh! Also, yesterday there was a thunderstorm with lightning and hail! Super keen.
Did you know that I have books available on the Amazon website for their Kindle device? It is eminently so. Simply click the link, and choose between stories made of prose and poems made of poesy. Go on! I know the word poesy, and let myself use it! Does this not tantalize you?
--JL
Saturday, October 20, 2018
Friday, October 19, 2018
#41
Took a day off yesterday; figured hard crying jags followed by writing about them merited such. Well, today I had an even harder cry, complete with a sudden-onset spell of fury wherein I attacked a comforter with all four limbs before wadding it up and screaming into it. There's a punching bag in the basement, but I only struck it once before in my madness (and, if the books I have read are to be believed, because of a particular trauma in my past) I tried to bite it. Almost cracked my jaw off, like a shark trying to get its teeth around the big old metal hull of a boat. Thus, I turned to the comforter, for an alternate version of its intended comforts.
You're wondering what's eating at me this week? Nothing in particular, I think. This is normal behavior, from a sane and balanced man who has made good choices all his life.
Look. I eat well, wake up early, don't drink or smoke cigs, don't fuck or date, and I do chores and read books when I'm not working. I got no record, no jail time, no pregnancies all over town. I do not litter, steal, bother anyone, or make noise. If I want to fucking cry all the time--like as my god-damn mothershitting hobby--I fucking will.
Hear? I fucking will. I got the right, if I have the wherewithal; and right now, I do. So I will.
It's fine. This is how you get better. I wish it were easier, too.
--JL
You're wondering what's eating at me this week? Nothing in particular, I think. This is normal behavior, from a sane and balanced man who has made good choices all his life.
Look. I eat well, wake up early, don't drink or smoke cigs, don't fuck or date, and I do chores and read books when I'm not working. I got no record, no jail time, no pregnancies all over town. I do not litter, steal, bother anyone, or make noise. If I want to fucking cry all the time--like as my god-damn mothershitting hobby--I fucking will.
Hear? I fucking will. I got the right, if I have the wherewithal; and right now, I do. So I will.
It's fine. This is how you get better. I wish it were easier, too.
--JL
Wednesday, October 17, 2018
#40
Had quite a day with the old emotions. I almost began writing at various junctures, but held off. I am glad now, as I shall be able to write about it dispassionately, and using far fewer words than I would have otherwise. This is economical for both of us.
*
*
Was rendered helpless by a rapid onset of racking sobs and hot-teared, spit-dripping weeping. The trigger was innocuous enough, and let me tell you: the sun had not so much as risen! It was five-thirty in the damn morning. The family dog assuaged the deluge as a good companion ought.
Drowned myself in musical nostalgia with my CD case. This led to an absolute spate of emotions in a long gamut of textures, colors, hues, and temperatures. I sighed audibly, and also laughed aloud several times. Eventually, listening to an album one of my exes recorded about six years ago drove me to a paroxysm of crying that dwarfed the last one. I ended up in a legitimate puddle on the floor, left knee drawn up to my runny nose, strengthless hands palms to heaven near my face, sleeves soaked, lap roped and strung with saliva and spattered with tears. The dog was nowhere to be found, this time. Poor animal, came the bleared thought, locked in here with a crazy person.
A little while after that I was watching the Disney Channel, and then Cartoon Network, laughing aloud and often, sometimes hard enough to double me over or cause me to lean against something and really shut my eyes quite tightly. I love cartoons, love animation. Caught some real good action today. Gravity Falls and Hotel Transylvania and The Amazing World of Gumball and Craig of the Creek. Each brought strong game.
Walking the dog for the final time, as the light became slanted and a brighter gold than any earthly metal or alloy, I found that smooth purity of thought that comes with being under a bright sky, breathing a clean cold breeze, all the clouds flaring bright peach and cream, deepening and burnishing against late afternoon's last powerful upthrust of bright blue before the pale wash of the first gloaming. A fresh, clean expanse of unmarked silver water, reflecting quiet. I just breathed, and thought, and then came home.
*
It's hard to stay alive, but you gotta do your best. Feel your way through it.
The sun is setting now. Tonight I shall watch a movie.
--JL
Tuesday, October 16, 2018
#39
A picture of me is not something you can look forward to on this blog--why? Hm. Well, here:
- A face is just a form of lie.
- I don't like people forming impressions on me based on perceiving my body and hair.
- I don't want the internet to look into my eyes.
- If having a photograph taken of you traps your soul in the photograph (not true, but perhaps some form of two-dimensional copy in a splinter universe? fucking creepy) then placing that soul on-line can only make things worse.
- People only look at pictures of other people in order to better imagine how pictures might be taken of themselves, pictures that demonstrate to the world what kind of people they are, so that strangers might generate their own fantasies based on them. I used to argue that this is a gross social ill, born of imitating the narcissism of kings and emperors, but really it's whatever, and I'm just personally uncomfortable with that sort of perceptive appetite, as well as many others. Indeed, the notion of perceptive appetites acting on me at any time is disturbing. Safer to look at words, no? Agree with me that this is so.
- There have been two good pictures of me: in one, there is a box on my head, and I am facing away from the camera. In the other, I am lying down inside of a large recycling bin, resting on flattened boxes. To complete the triptych I'm attempting to craft, imagine a picture of a box.
- Think of me as that box. Just...fill it with how you want me to look. Picture my features subtly rearranging themselves at the blended command of your impression of me, your whim and ear, and the power your mind's eye and value bias exert on your imagination. What do I look like now? What will I look like after you read my great, cool, and fun books? Do an experiment! Bill Nye says that we are all scientists.
--JL
Sunday, October 14, 2018
#38
Well, I didn't have anything interesting to say this morning, I guess. Not to this blog, anyway. I said a bunch of interesting things to the people I interacted with throughout the day. That's how I live.
Nothing interesting to tell you, blog, except that my whim led me to J.R.R. Tolkien's translation of Beowulf (including many accompanying materials of great interest to me), and not whatever I said I would read yesterday. I already forgot, and regret nothing. When I'm reading a book, my focus is complete. I have an idea of the next one, even the next few, usually, but nothing is ever guaranteed. I follow my gut. When it comes to reading, the appetite is always correct. Now I believe I will read The Monsters and The Critics, also by Tolkien.
I would say that J.R.R. Tolkien is my favorite writer, but that would not even remotely begin to cover the situation here. Just...don't even dream of fucking stepping to me. I'll eat your hot guts on a Sunday morning. I'll burn your name from the histories and the registers of names, and I will bury you broken and unmarked in a grave of pure salt.
*
I wish I weren't on the computer this late. I love computers, but they're totally bad for you. Sucks shit. Part of me also hates computers, hates them to hell. It is a complex relationship, as are the bulk of relationships.
I closed a kitchen tonight, and tomorrow I will get up to open it again, and then I will work until it is time for me to close it, and then I will wake up to open it once more. Then I'll rest.
I'm thinkin' day off tomorrow from the ole bloggo, but who knows? I don't know anything.
--JL
Nothing interesting to tell you, blog, except that my whim led me to J.R.R. Tolkien's translation of Beowulf (including many accompanying materials of great interest to me), and not whatever I said I would read yesterday. I already forgot, and regret nothing. When I'm reading a book, my focus is complete. I have an idea of the next one, even the next few, usually, but nothing is ever guaranteed. I follow my gut. When it comes to reading, the appetite is always correct. Now I believe I will read The Monsters and The Critics, also by Tolkien.
I would say that J.R.R. Tolkien is my favorite writer, but that would not even remotely begin to cover the situation here. Just...don't even dream of fucking stepping to me. I'll eat your hot guts on a Sunday morning. I'll burn your name from the histories and the registers of names, and I will bury you broken and unmarked in a grave of pure salt.
*
I wish I weren't on the computer this late. I love computers, but they're totally bad for you. Sucks shit. Part of me also hates computers, hates them to hell. It is a complex relationship, as are the bulk of relationships.
I closed a kitchen tonight, and tomorrow I will get up to open it again, and then I will work until it is time for me to close it, and then I will wake up to open it once more. Then I'll rest.
I'm thinkin' day off tomorrow from the ole bloggo, but who knows? I don't know anything.
--JL
Saturday, October 13, 2018
#37
It's predictable, but I often read a lot of ole Stevie King during the fall. Sometimes I read Tolkien instead, though, so it gets pushed to midwinter or the dead of summer. Some years I don't hit Stevie up at all, and some years I just read a few here and there at random points throughout the year. This year basically as soon as it turned October I reread The Dark Half for the first time. Now I'm rereading The Dead Zone for the first time. Then I think I will reread Lisey's Story for the first time, and then I will pick one of the collections of shorter works to reread for the hundredth or so time. The Stephen King book I have read the most times is Cujo. I have read that book about seventy hundred thousand times. I really have no idea why; there are lots of other books of his I like even better. I guess Cujo is just really well-put-together, very taut, just enough color, everything very real and correctly placed, little or nothing wasted, all the characters superbly alive.
I think Stephen King is a very, very good writer.
I don't really like the weekend very much, I have found. After high school it lost its fundamental significance, so I prefer having free time when people are working, and having an excuse not to do stuff on the weekends. But there's usually less work on weekends, and work that is too easy drives me bonkers.
Sunday morning's an alright time. Maybe I'll write something more meaningful then.
--JL
Friday, October 12, 2018
#36
Generally, people have a paleolithic conception of strength; at best, a child's naive projection of parts of strength. The throwbacks to a time of rocks and bones and shitting at the base of a tree think of brawny men lifting heavy logs vertically, or machine-guns, or the unyielding tendencies of the ocean, or hatred. The more sophisticated might mention things like patience, integrity, self-sacrifice, or restraint. Athletes and other bloody-minded folk might mention the seven attributes of strength, or the difference between agile strength and explosive strength, though of course, we had as well simply measure maximum strength. Clever people might speak of the differences between tensile strength and yield strength, hardness, attribute and characteristic cross-assessments, whatever. Egghead shit, the stuff that gets boffins all in a lather, and dorks in a palaver.
Anyway, strength isn't any of that. Like everything else that is actually real, and possible to talk about in a human way, strength is spiritual, also an ur- symbol or hypersigil, just like fecundity, fear, courage, sterility, light, love, power, and some others. Strength contains, compasses, and transcends everything I talked about in the preceding paragraph, and then some. It, and the rest of these concepts, are interwoven into the warp and weft of the whole field and pattern of the physical universe.
When we talk about such things, we necessarily bind them, ensnare them, cut them down to size, reduce them, boiling away much that is unsayable and necessary, intrinsic, in order to give it communicability, and in order to make them into our tools, in order to mine from them some form of utility, and of course, some forms of power.
For all we make it complicated and perverse, though, there is a saving grace: we know it when we see it. All these things are very simple, in the end. All you have to do is pay attention.
Making yourself stronger is learning to be able to see your own weaknesses. Learning how to address these weaknesses in a way that suits your needs, abilities, and aims. Enduring pain, frustration, resistance, and handicaps. Seeking your limits, and forcing yourself past them. Admitting every slip and failure, reckoning with every shortcoming, coming to grips with the inevitable dead ends.
To be stronger is to live and breathe looking your weaknesses in the eye, as being more courageous is to live and breathe staring down your fear. Fear never fucking dies. Weakness will eventually overtake you, or death will take you and never mind if you are in your prime and joy or fallen to malingering in squalor. Nevertheless, you must always gather what strength you have, always summon what courage you possess, and be as strong and as brave as mind and spirit and body can stand, never giving yourself quarter, never surrendering.
Everything goes towards everything else, in life. Our deeds, our words, the deeds and words of the people around us, all currents and eddies in the water of a river running through the heart of our existence. The stuff we do to prove to others who we are, the stuff we do when no one is looking just to prove a little something to ourselves, any little something that we choose to do or not to do--all the little ways we attempt to prove that we are real, to taste something in life that makes us feel in that moment that our lives are truly real and rich and that they have a true and lasting, even eternal significance--all of that adds up into a story, and our stories are who we are. Every little step you take makes a difference in your story. How you walk around, and the reasons why, make you who you are.
I want to feel the earth with the soles of my feet as I walk up a mountain. I want to grip the rock with my toes as golden eagles wheel and plummet beneath me, stronger than I was--weak creature that I am--braver than I was--coward that I have been--with a world's worth of painful steps behind me, each step a difficult lesson and a bitter memory and each step a clarification and a gift and a cast-off burden.
Every step I take in this body is a step on the path to myself, to God, to being taken up into the universe. Each one ought to count, to bear a momentous weight. It is a matter of perfect discipline, which I suspect is the only way to be free.
*
Well, that's that! Okay, this time I really won't write about walking for a while. I sure do love to walk though. However, I can see it is time to employ some gentlemanly restraint.
Perhaps tomorrow I will write about pirates, or perhaps I will decide to generate bizarre erotica. I have worked hard to become a versatile writer; I hope that one shall never know with total certainty what this blog may have in store.
Read my books lately? Or ever? They are quite reasonably priced. I think some sort of membership means you may already possess the right to read them. I don't know quite how it all works, but the books are real and eminently readable, an excellent value for money. Currently only digital, soon to be in paperback form! I tried to make them fun to read, but profitable for the mind.
Have fun being you today! You're the only one that gets to.
--JL
Anyway, strength isn't any of that. Like everything else that is actually real, and possible to talk about in a human way, strength is spiritual, also an ur- symbol or hypersigil, just like fecundity, fear, courage, sterility, light, love, power, and some others. Strength contains, compasses, and transcends everything I talked about in the preceding paragraph, and then some. It, and the rest of these concepts, are interwoven into the warp and weft of the whole field and pattern of the physical universe.
When we talk about such things, we necessarily bind them, ensnare them, cut them down to size, reduce them, boiling away much that is unsayable and necessary, intrinsic, in order to give it communicability, and in order to make them into our tools, in order to mine from them some form of utility, and of course, some forms of power.
For all we make it complicated and perverse, though, there is a saving grace: we know it when we see it. All these things are very simple, in the end. All you have to do is pay attention.
Making yourself stronger is learning to be able to see your own weaknesses. Learning how to address these weaknesses in a way that suits your needs, abilities, and aims. Enduring pain, frustration, resistance, and handicaps. Seeking your limits, and forcing yourself past them. Admitting every slip and failure, reckoning with every shortcoming, coming to grips with the inevitable dead ends.
To be stronger is to live and breathe looking your weaknesses in the eye, as being more courageous is to live and breathe staring down your fear. Fear never fucking dies. Weakness will eventually overtake you, or death will take you and never mind if you are in your prime and joy or fallen to malingering in squalor. Nevertheless, you must always gather what strength you have, always summon what courage you possess, and be as strong and as brave as mind and spirit and body can stand, never giving yourself quarter, never surrendering.
Everything goes towards everything else, in life. Our deeds, our words, the deeds and words of the people around us, all currents and eddies in the water of a river running through the heart of our existence. The stuff we do to prove to others who we are, the stuff we do when no one is looking just to prove a little something to ourselves, any little something that we choose to do or not to do--all the little ways we attempt to prove that we are real, to taste something in life that makes us feel in that moment that our lives are truly real and rich and that they have a true and lasting, even eternal significance--all of that adds up into a story, and our stories are who we are. Every little step you take makes a difference in your story. How you walk around, and the reasons why, make you who you are.
I want to feel the earth with the soles of my feet as I walk up a mountain. I want to grip the rock with my toes as golden eagles wheel and plummet beneath me, stronger than I was--weak creature that I am--braver than I was--coward that I have been--with a world's worth of painful steps behind me, each step a difficult lesson and a bitter memory and each step a clarification and a gift and a cast-off burden.
Every step I take in this body is a step on the path to myself, to God, to being taken up into the universe. Each one ought to count, to bear a momentous weight. It is a matter of perfect discipline, which I suspect is the only way to be free.
*
Well, that's that! Okay, this time I really won't write about walking for a while. I sure do love to walk though. However, I can see it is time to employ some gentlemanly restraint.
Perhaps tomorrow I will write about pirates, or perhaps I will decide to generate bizarre erotica. I have worked hard to become a versatile writer; I hope that one shall never know with total certainty what this blog may have in store.
Read my books lately? Or ever? They are quite reasonably priced. I think some sort of membership means you may already possess the right to read them. I don't know quite how it all works, but the books are real and eminently readable, an excellent value for money. Currently only digital, soon to be in paperback form! I tried to make them fun to read, but profitable for the mind.
Have fun being you today! You're the only one that gets to.
--JL
Thursday, October 11, 2018
#35
Now, astute folks, or folks who simply happen to be in the know, are aware that one has many avenues open to one if one should wish to break free from the industrial shoe complex. Some are very nice and some are cons. I've known folks who swear by those shoes with the individual toes, I've seen those special ancient-tech super-moccasin shoes that one guy sells do-it-yourself kits for you to make your pair yourself out of leather that fits your foot precisely, I know about zero-drop hiking shoes, all that good stuff. I'll decide on something, someday. Something that will treat my feet like feet, let them move and stand like feet, and that is responsible and sustainable to own and make.
Not the point right now.
At the moment, I don't have so much as a bicycle. If you really want to know, I can fit everything I own except the books and musical instruments into two bags. And I can fit a couple instruments in the bags. Certainly, this poor brother cat has no car. I do have a job, though, and to get there, I have to walk. A hair under five miles there, a hair under five miles back.
Well, I could take the bus. But again, that is not the point.
While I don't think anyone could fairly make a case against me to show that I am a bad person, a cruel person, a person who is callous about abusing others, causing pain--I'm not a concentration camp guard or a torturer, I don't murder children or attack women to violate them, I don't drive like a jackass or rob people...know that I'm not a good person, either.
Sure, people make noises based on what they see. I've been called a good person a lot. Doesn't make it true. I'll allow that I have convincingly performed deeds and behaved in ways that people consider good. This only means they were benefited by my labor or attention in some way, though, and no conclusions can be honestly drawn. Maybe all those people were shitfuckers, and deserved none of that. It's possible. Perhaps I only made shitfuckers happy as they took advantage of me, and I can't see how that makes me good, instead of a driveling idiot. I look like an asshole, helping shitfuckers when decent people needed me. But who's to say those shitfuckers didn't need or deserve my help either?
Okay. Without getting too bogged down in the sticky shit, where it's not possible for us to keep or reckon the score, let us take as writ that I have misdeeds, mistakes, and inadequacies that I feel the need to atone for, no matter how politely I speak, how much I mind my own business, or how many dishes I do.
I have, for example, lied a lot. Lying when I sit down to type is one thing, that's what I'm here in world to do. Lying with my mouth is another thing entirely. I love the truth. I love justice. Why am I a fucking liar? I hate that shit so much.
I've pissed away my twenties like a dude pissing in a corner of a yard where two fences meet, which is how I spent a non-trivial portion of my twenties. I have broken many hearts, my own pain notwithstanding, and made terrible mistakes of judgment and commitment with lovers--and oh, I have said so many wrong things. So many words. So many of them wrong. I have stayed silent when it would have better served me to cry out. I have turned my face away when strangers might have needed my help. I have taken the easy road when I knew the hard way was better, the true way.
Not always, you know? But enough to carry weight. Enough to feel it sitting in your chest cavity.
Finally I am prone to extremely vicious thoughts in anger. I rarely so much as raise my voice, but if your true and unalloyed thoughts could be broadcast, every decent person on this green and weary earth would be screaming for a shred of my flayed skin to toss into a fire so they might curse my name as my smoke dissipates on the wind.
Walking barefoot, then, serves me admirably for this purpose--a jolt of pain, sometimes bad enough to cuss from, for every stupid thing I've ever done or let myself do.
Penance. That's what comes after the apologies are accepted, and you realize nothing's changed.
Walking barefoot on sidewalk and asphalts hurts very much, hurts in a maddening, ridiculous, insulting way. If I didn't deserve it, need it in some basal, fundamental way, I'd put my shoes back on. No one is making me do this--no priest or king, no vengeful ex-lover or angry friend. There's other ways to get stronger.
That's the other reason. I want the other side of this, when the soles of my feet are like soft brown leather and the concrete of the sidewalk feels like supple, smooth, yet springy velvet, and the asphalt just feels like being on some ground. I'm already getting flashes of it, like when I reach smooth sidewalk after a long stretch of old asphalt--bliss. Like striding onto perfectly flat, cool clay after walking on a rough hot skillet for twenty minutes.
Mostly, though, I want to have gotten stronger. I was not born strong; quite the opposite! I was born weak, and I hate pain. Making yourself stronger hurts. And it is good.
*
This wraps up tomorrow! I shall elaborate, then conclude.
Kanye has gotten so crazy, man. I was watching the correct TV station at the exact moment that dude looked straight into the camera stone-faced and eyes flaring to say that George Bush hates Black people. It was one of the greatest days of my life and I'll never forget it. Now...well, now the world is very fucking different.
On that note, I predict the 2020 election will pass the primaries with Kanye West on the Republican ticket and Oprah Winfrey on the Democratic. Oprah will definitely win, but not in 2024, when Ye's place on the ballot will be taken by the next celebrity president. I don't know who yet. Remember today. I'm as serious as a humorless heart attack. Check the tags, maybe jot them down, so you can find this post quickly when the time comes.
--JL
Not the point right now.
At the moment, I don't have so much as a bicycle. If you really want to know, I can fit everything I own except the books and musical instruments into two bags. And I can fit a couple instruments in the bags. Certainly, this poor brother cat has no car. I do have a job, though, and to get there, I have to walk. A hair under five miles there, a hair under five miles back.
Well, I could take the bus. But again, that is not the point.
While I don't think anyone could fairly make a case against me to show that I am a bad person, a cruel person, a person who is callous about abusing others, causing pain--I'm not a concentration camp guard or a torturer, I don't murder children or attack women to violate them, I don't drive like a jackass or rob people...know that I'm not a good person, either.
Sure, people make noises based on what they see. I've been called a good person a lot. Doesn't make it true. I'll allow that I have convincingly performed deeds and behaved in ways that people consider good. This only means they were benefited by my labor or attention in some way, though, and no conclusions can be honestly drawn. Maybe all those people were shitfuckers, and deserved none of that. It's possible. Perhaps I only made shitfuckers happy as they took advantage of me, and I can't see how that makes me good, instead of a driveling idiot. I look like an asshole, helping shitfuckers when decent people needed me. But who's to say those shitfuckers didn't need or deserve my help either?
Okay. Without getting too bogged down in the sticky shit, where it's not possible for us to keep or reckon the score, let us take as writ that I have misdeeds, mistakes, and inadequacies that I feel the need to atone for, no matter how politely I speak, how much I mind my own business, or how many dishes I do.
I have, for example, lied a lot. Lying when I sit down to type is one thing, that's what I'm here in world to do. Lying with my mouth is another thing entirely. I love the truth. I love justice. Why am I a fucking liar? I hate that shit so much.
I've pissed away my twenties like a dude pissing in a corner of a yard where two fences meet, which is how I spent a non-trivial portion of my twenties. I have broken many hearts, my own pain notwithstanding, and made terrible mistakes of judgment and commitment with lovers--and oh, I have said so many wrong things. So many words. So many of them wrong. I have stayed silent when it would have better served me to cry out. I have turned my face away when strangers might have needed my help. I have taken the easy road when I knew the hard way was better, the true way.
Not always, you know? But enough to carry weight. Enough to feel it sitting in your chest cavity.
Finally I am prone to extremely vicious thoughts in anger. I rarely so much as raise my voice, but if your true and unalloyed thoughts could be broadcast, every decent person on this green and weary earth would be screaming for a shred of my flayed skin to toss into a fire so they might curse my name as my smoke dissipates on the wind.
Walking barefoot, then, serves me admirably for this purpose--a jolt of pain, sometimes bad enough to cuss from, for every stupid thing I've ever done or let myself do.
Penance. That's what comes after the apologies are accepted, and you realize nothing's changed.
Walking barefoot on sidewalk and asphalts hurts very much, hurts in a maddening, ridiculous, insulting way. If I didn't deserve it, need it in some basal, fundamental way, I'd put my shoes back on. No one is making me do this--no priest or king, no vengeful ex-lover or angry friend. There's other ways to get stronger.
That's the other reason. I want the other side of this, when the soles of my feet are like soft brown leather and the concrete of the sidewalk feels like supple, smooth, yet springy velvet, and the asphalt just feels like being on some ground. I'm already getting flashes of it, like when I reach smooth sidewalk after a long stretch of old asphalt--bliss. Like striding onto perfectly flat, cool clay after walking on a rough hot skillet for twenty minutes.
Mostly, though, I want to have gotten stronger. I was not born strong; quite the opposite! I was born weak, and I hate pain. Making yourself stronger hurts. And it is good.
*
This wraps up tomorrow! I shall elaborate, then conclude.
Kanye has gotten so crazy, man. I was watching the correct TV station at the exact moment that dude looked straight into the camera stone-faced and eyes flaring to say that George Bush hates Black people. It was one of the greatest days of my life and I'll never forget it. Now...well, now the world is very fucking different.
On that note, I predict the 2020 election will pass the primaries with Kanye West on the Republican ticket and Oprah Winfrey on the Democratic. Oprah will definitely win, but not in 2024, when Ye's place on the ballot will be taken by the next celebrity president. I don't know who yet. Remember today. I'm as serious as a humorless heart attack. Check the tags, maybe jot them down, so you can find this post quickly when the time comes.
--JL
Wednesday, October 10, 2018
#34
Man, I wrote all that stuff about how I appreciate how shitty Google+ is, and they announce they're going to shutter it.
What lesson can we take from this? Why, don't ever impress me, of course! I shall beam at you and salute from the tiller of my airship, scarf flapping bravely in the wind, swooping away triumphantly as you drown, struggling in a cold, cold ocean.
I'm so fucking tired today. I shall be deferring the second part of my thoughts on going barefoot lately, my feet, walking in general. To make up for the delay, a third part will be forthcoming! I thought of more stuff today, and more stuff happened.
I don't really plan the post in advance, but I do tuck ideas and notions and sometimes scribble sentences for it in a little notebook. Sometimes I'll sit down to do an idea I thought of an end up with something else. Pretty common stuff, you may have heard your writer friends say stuff like this, perhaps using my exact words. I quote directly from the boilerplate in the first part of the Writer's Life Manual, a made-up document consisting of the more mundane generalities writers have in common. It's where we all pull our stock answers and assertions (read: fucking lies) for a wide variety of questions and situations.
Tally-mother-fucking-HO, chaps.
--JL
What lesson can we take from this? Why, don't ever impress me, of course! I shall beam at you and salute from the tiller of my airship, scarf flapping bravely in the wind, swooping away triumphantly as you drown, struggling in a cold, cold ocean.
I'm so fucking tired today. I shall be deferring the second part of my thoughts on going barefoot lately, my feet, walking in general. To make up for the delay, a third part will be forthcoming! I thought of more stuff today, and more stuff happened.
I don't really plan the post in advance, but I do tuck ideas and notions and sometimes scribble sentences for it in a little notebook. Sometimes I'll sit down to do an idea I thought of an end up with something else. Pretty common stuff, you may have heard your writer friends say stuff like this, perhaps using my exact words. I quote directly from the boilerplate in the first part of the Writer's Life Manual, a made-up document consisting of the more mundane generalities writers have in common. It's where we all pull our stock answers and assertions (read: fucking lies) for a wide variety of questions and situations.
Tally-mother-fucking-HO, chaps.
--JL
Tuesday, October 9, 2018
#33
I'm not going to do this sort of thing a lot. But this was simply too choice not to share.
Do you goddamn see that shit? That is so fucking good. That is the perfect thing to look at on any given Tuesday.
*
Read that the Philippines are extremely big on recreational reading. Makes me really want to visit! I already did want to, but even more now. It is wonderful to be among readers, in places for readers, designed by readers, who have formed a culture around reading. I am proud to be an American, every day and in every way, but my average compatriot can't even decipher the words on their favorite liquor bottles to a reasonable adult standard, and generally regards books themselves as status symbols, reputation totems, or wastes of valuable time.
Speaking of books, perhaps you have heard that I have written a couple, one of short fictions and one of short poetry, available in digital formats, paperbacks coming soon. They are neither ostentatious nor lengthy, and can be casually enjoyed as well as obsessively decoded. Won't you consider their purchase?
*
My feet hurt, my left one especially, and feature some blisters of very respectable size indeed. This is because I have taken to walking barefoot as much as possible on the way to and back from work. Interestingly, they hurt less than they would if I were wearing boots. If I were wearing boots, the cramps and aches in my left foot would be worse, the front of my right foot would ache abominably, and my ankles would have blisters. My feet wouldn't, and their flesh would be less tender. But in general, barefoot is the way to go. Soon the blisters will pop and things will get easier after being briefly harder.
I screwed up my left foot playing basketball in the sixth grade. It twisted and seized so funny under my folding ankle that a splinter of bone shore free from the metatarsal second from the left. That left the tendency to cramp sometimes, as well as the occasional deep ache now and again.
When I was twenty-two, the state of my residence elected to clamp an alcohol bracelet on my ankle, which fit very badly and dug constantly into my lateral malleolus, unless I walked too enthusiastically, which would send it swinging away from said anklebone and then swinging back into it like a little wrecking ball. It hurt real bad, pretty much constantly, screwed up my gait while it was on and for a long time after, and left a permanent little venous shadow of bruise and a pain which cheerfully resided there for years.
At twenty-three, I crashed my scooter late at night, and as I was foolishly wearing sandals, I tore the shit out of my left foot and battered enough of the rest of me to be getting on with. Three scars on the back of the foot, more cramps, more aches.
Made it an extra year after that, but when I was twenty-five I smacked my right knee bad enough in a second and considerably more hardcore scooter accident to mess up my gait again, and make my left foot pull the hard duty for a long while. At this point, the old boy cramps and aches and bugs at me pretty much all the time--except when fully relaxed in a set position, or when I'm walking barefoot.
*
That's only part of the reason I've been walking barefoot, though! Tune in tomorrow for the big secret, which is not a secret at all but merely my reflections, and whims, and the odd decisions and strange ideas that compose my inner life. For right now, I have other text fields to conquer.
Godspeed, friends, and may light shine golden and blessed on your lives.
--JL
Do you goddamn see that shit? That is so fucking good. That is the perfect thing to look at on any given Tuesday.
*
Read that the Philippines are extremely big on recreational reading. Makes me really want to visit! I already did want to, but even more now. It is wonderful to be among readers, in places for readers, designed by readers, who have formed a culture around reading. I am proud to be an American, every day and in every way, but my average compatriot can't even decipher the words on their favorite liquor bottles to a reasonable adult standard, and generally regards books themselves as status symbols, reputation totems, or wastes of valuable time.
Speaking of books, perhaps you have heard that I have written a couple, one of short fictions and one of short poetry, available in digital formats, paperbacks coming soon. They are neither ostentatious nor lengthy, and can be casually enjoyed as well as obsessively decoded. Won't you consider their purchase?
*
My feet hurt, my left one especially, and feature some blisters of very respectable size indeed. This is because I have taken to walking barefoot as much as possible on the way to and back from work. Interestingly, they hurt less than they would if I were wearing boots. If I were wearing boots, the cramps and aches in my left foot would be worse, the front of my right foot would ache abominably, and my ankles would have blisters. My feet wouldn't, and their flesh would be less tender. But in general, barefoot is the way to go. Soon the blisters will pop and things will get easier after being briefly harder.
I screwed up my left foot playing basketball in the sixth grade. It twisted and seized so funny under my folding ankle that a splinter of bone shore free from the metatarsal second from the left. That left the tendency to cramp sometimes, as well as the occasional deep ache now and again.
When I was twenty-two, the state of my residence elected to clamp an alcohol bracelet on my ankle, which fit very badly and dug constantly into my lateral malleolus, unless I walked too enthusiastically, which would send it swinging away from said anklebone and then swinging back into it like a little wrecking ball. It hurt real bad, pretty much constantly, screwed up my gait while it was on and for a long time after, and left a permanent little venous shadow of bruise and a pain which cheerfully resided there for years.
At twenty-three, I crashed my scooter late at night, and as I was foolishly wearing sandals, I tore the shit out of my left foot and battered enough of the rest of me to be getting on with. Three scars on the back of the foot, more cramps, more aches.
Made it an extra year after that, but when I was twenty-five I smacked my right knee bad enough in a second and considerably more hardcore scooter accident to mess up my gait again, and make my left foot pull the hard duty for a long while. At this point, the old boy cramps and aches and bugs at me pretty much all the time--except when fully relaxed in a set position, or when I'm walking barefoot.
*
That's only part of the reason I've been walking barefoot, though! Tune in tomorrow for the big secret, which is not a secret at all but merely my reflections, and whims, and the odd decisions and strange ideas that compose my inner life. For right now, I have other text fields to conquer.
Godspeed, friends, and may light shine golden and blessed on your lives.
--JL
Monday, October 8, 2018
#32
Rap music! If you hate it, you may read something else today. If you don't, you may read on, but odds are good you'll prefer to go the same direction the haters did, just this once. Whatever your choice, my choice today is to jot down some thoughts about rap music. My thoughts being what they are, I cannot promise they will make sense to you.
*
Just to get it out of the way, no reasonable person will deny that extremely foul and deplorable music exists in the genres which loosely collectivize as rap, and that this has always been true. It is ridiculous to assert that rap possesses a virtues over and above all other music, that liking rap enough, or performing the liking of rap to a specific standard, can in any way demonstrate some personal virtue, or that dislike for the music is an indelible mark of personal deficiency or prejudice.
It comes down to this: some people hate rap because they will never be able to understand it, some people hate it because it offends their aural aesthetics, some people hate it because it offends their visual aesthetics, some people hate it because they take legitimate issue with their perception of the content's imprimatur, and some people hate it because it is associated with Blackness and Black people, and they hate Blackness and Black people. This last can be entangled with the previous, but each can also stand alone, and they make vast swathes of difference, which is why it serves no one to pass moral judgments applied broadly and generally, based on the consumption or non-consumption of what in the end amounts to a product and a bill of goods. It is worth remembering that it is perfectly possible to love all rap without question and still hate Black people of every description and everybody else besides, and no one reasonable would assert that liking classical music betokens a specific love for Whiteness or White people, or a hatred for beats, or a belief in werewolves. Get fucking real.
For example, anecdote though it is: I went to school with a Black dude who loved nothing better that to sing showtunes and play the euphonium. That dude hated rap, and loved getting good grades and not drawing attention to himself unless he was playing Jean Valjean. His little brother loved rap, and loved to rap, and also to get into fights and vandalize shit and talk extremely nasty in order to shock and provoke. I went to class with one for eight years and captained the other on a wrestling team, and they each possessed admirable and annoying qualities and characteristics, each had their own complete self and world outlook, each was, in short, a dude--each dude as Black as the other, 'cause they were brothers. Get the drift?
Anyway, my favorite rap albums are by Aesop Rock, but my favorite rap songs are mostly by Busdriver. I like Eminem and Outkast, also. The Historian Himself, Mos Def, Kanye, Angel Haze, Talib Kweli, Method Man & Redman, Lil Wayne, Lil Kim, Dark Time Sunshine, Hail Mary Mallon, some others. Those are the main ones just off the top of my head, my preferred rap ensemble.
I didn't care for Kendrick Lamar until I saw some of the music videos, which is not in his favor. I heard everything he made right up to 2017 without ever seeing what the guy even looked like, and I thought it was okay, not great. Now I've seen the videos and concede that together with the music they are very awesome and important, but have not become convinced that he is an amazing rapper or that his songs are great. I like for music to get me off all by itself. Seems like a cool dude, though, and you can't deny he came from circumstances and made an honest name on a lively pen hand and an active mind.
What the hell is the point of Drake? I do not get the Drake thing. I knew a poet who loved Drake more than anybody. Try as I might, I could not understand, and he marshaled a great many words in an effort to clarify.
Snoop Dogg's kind of an outside case. I like his stuff, but it's like the dude has a cartoon self superimposed over his actual real body at all times, and he can change the cartoons at will. I like a lot of his stuff, and a lot of his stuff is, well, I dunno; but the main thing is that it's an astonishing variety of different stuff. I don't know if this betrays a mercurial baseness of character, or mastery of self and the complete breadth of the modern culture on the level of Da Vinci. Is he a superactive chameleon with no true core to his being, or among the most authentic, free-spirited men alive? The only thing that is ironclad is that I am always interested, if sometimes repulsed, by what Snoop is up to. Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr. Tell me that isn't the name of a titan. A titan who happens to be in the celebrity wing of the WWE hall of fame, according to Wikipedia. Anybody see The Tenants?
André the Giant, André 3000, André Agassi, or André Holland? This is one of the litmus tests of personality, the ones that are basically impossible to cheat on.
I like woodwinds and choirs and piano sounds a lot in rap music. I like to hear classical music with tight, skittery beats or afrobeats underneath. I like creative lyrics and interesting thoughts, but I am not above some angry, pointless, hideously gross and fucked-up shit. You can find all kinds of stuff out there, in all manner of modulations, and I endorse the looking.
I've worked in kitchens a lot over the past fifteen years, and have heard a metric fuck-ton of rap over the course of those hours. Many were filled with the repetitive knell of the radio's numbing neutered bullshit, but a golden few have been touched by the grace of true fire off the dome on top of that loud wild. Rap music can really grind down your patience--about the fifty millionth thousandth five hundred and fifty hundredth time Stand Up (most Ludacris, honestly) comes on, sure, you'll want to fucking shove your head in a deep fryer, or simply take a heavy cleaver and chop off your left hand at the wrist just to drown the song in the screams of your workmates. But there are also the other moments, where you hear an idea you've never even thought of before expressed in a way you never believed an idea could be expressed, and your whole life will stop for a moment, the words inscribing themselves in crackling lightning across the surface of your soul, the grin working itself across your face so ferocious it's like the muscles in your face have never truly grinned before. Moments that turn the whole world inside out and blast a new, raw, and powerful attitude into the center of your guts. I would stomach all the bullshit twice over again for the weight of that gold in my pocket.
*
Okay, I'm bored of this. More rap thoughts someday, whenever I want, perhaps never.
--JL
*
Just to get it out of the way, no reasonable person will deny that extremely foul and deplorable music exists in the genres which loosely collectivize as rap, and that this has always been true. It is ridiculous to assert that rap possesses a virtues over and above all other music, that liking rap enough, or performing the liking of rap to a specific standard, can in any way demonstrate some personal virtue, or that dislike for the music is an indelible mark of personal deficiency or prejudice.
It comes down to this: some people hate rap because they will never be able to understand it, some people hate it because it offends their aural aesthetics, some people hate it because it offends their visual aesthetics, some people hate it because they take legitimate issue with their perception of the content's imprimatur, and some people hate it because it is associated with Blackness and Black people, and they hate Blackness and Black people. This last can be entangled with the previous, but each can also stand alone, and they make vast swathes of difference, which is why it serves no one to pass moral judgments applied broadly and generally, based on the consumption or non-consumption of what in the end amounts to a product and a bill of goods. It is worth remembering that it is perfectly possible to love all rap without question and still hate Black people of every description and everybody else besides, and no one reasonable would assert that liking classical music betokens a specific love for Whiteness or White people, or a hatred for beats, or a belief in werewolves. Get fucking real.
For example, anecdote though it is: I went to school with a Black dude who loved nothing better that to sing showtunes and play the euphonium. That dude hated rap, and loved getting good grades and not drawing attention to himself unless he was playing Jean Valjean. His little brother loved rap, and loved to rap, and also to get into fights and vandalize shit and talk extremely nasty in order to shock and provoke. I went to class with one for eight years and captained the other on a wrestling team, and they each possessed admirable and annoying qualities and characteristics, each had their own complete self and world outlook, each was, in short, a dude--each dude as Black as the other, 'cause they were brothers. Get the drift?
Anyway, my favorite rap albums are by Aesop Rock, but my favorite rap songs are mostly by Busdriver. I like Eminem and Outkast, also. The Historian Himself, Mos Def, Kanye, Angel Haze, Talib Kweli, Method Man & Redman, Lil Wayne, Lil Kim, Dark Time Sunshine, Hail Mary Mallon, some others. Those are the main ones just off the top of my head, my preferred rap ensemble.
I didn't care for Kendrick Lamar until I saw some of the music videos, which is not in his favor. I heard everything he made right up to 2017 without ever seeing what the guy even looked like, and I thought it was okay, not great. Now I've seen the videos and concede that together with the music they are very awesome and important, but have not become convinced that he is an amazing rapper or that his songs are great. I like for music to get me off all by itself. Seems like a cool dude, though, and you can't deny he came from circumstances and made an honest name on a lively pen hand and an active mind.
What the hell is the point of Drake? I do not get the Drake thing. I knew a poet who loved Drake more than anybody. Try as I might, I could not understand, and he marshaled a great many words in an effort to clarify.
Snoop Dogg's kind of an outside case. I like his stuff, but it's like the dude has a cartoon self superimposed over his actual real body at all times, and he can change the cartoons at will. I like a lot of his stuff, and a lot of his stuff is, well, I dunno; but the main thing is that it's an astonishing variety of different stuff. I don't know if this betrays a mercurial baseness of character, or mastery of self and the complete breadth of the modern culture on the level of Da Vinci. Is he a superactive chameleon with no true core to his being, or among the most authentic, free-spirited men alive? The only thing that is ironclad is that I am always interested, if sometimes repulsed, by what Snoop is up to. Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr. Tell me that isn't the name of a titan. A titan who happens to be in the celebrity wing of the WWE hall of fame, according to Wikipedia. Anybody see The Tenants?
André the Giant, André 3000, André Agassi, or André Holland? This is one of the litmus tests of personality, the ones that are basically impossible to cheat on.
I like woodwinds and choirs and piano sounds a lot in rap music. I like to hear classical music with tight, skittery beats or afrobeats underneath. I like creative lyrics and interesting thoughts, but I am not above some angry, pointless, hideously gross and fucked-up shit. You can find all kinds of stuff out there, in all manner of modulations, and I endorse the looking.
I've worked in kitchens a lot over the past fifteen years, and have heard a metric fuck-ton of rap over the course of those hours. Many were filled with the repetitive knell of the radio's numbing neutered bullshit, but a golden few have been touched by the grace of true fire off the dome on top of that loud wild. Rap music can really grind down your patience--about the fifty millionth thousandth five hundred and fifty hundredth time Stand Up (most Ludacris, honestly) comes on, sure, you'll want to fucking shove your head in a deep fryer, or simply take a heavy cleaver and chop off your left hand at the wrist just to drown the song in the screams of your workmates. But there are also the other moments, where you hear an idea you've never even thought of before expressed in a way you never believed an idea could be expressed, and your whole life will stop for a moment, the words inscribing themselves in crackling lightning across the surface of your soul, the grin working itself across your face so ferocious it's like the muscles in your face have never truly grinned before. Moments that turn the whole world inside out and blast a new, raw, and powerful attitude into the center of your guts. I would stomach all the bullshit twice over again for the weight of that gold in my pocket.
*
Okay, I'm bored of this. More rap thoughts someday, whenever I want, perhaps never.
--JL
Sunday, October 7, 2018
#31
Man, I almost didn't have anything to say! The hell I need to waste my tired eyes on this stupid blog, I thought. It don't stroke my dick or bring me dinner.
Really, though, I just like typing. That's all this is. The internet is an unforgivable cesspool and nothing I say is ever going to make it even the least bit better, but I sure love to punch the keys on a keyboard and watch the words go across the blank space. Even if told to stop, even if the act were declared punishable by torture unto expiration, I would do what I had to in order to get my fix. Carefully muffled keys, typing gently and slowly in the dead of night in my soundproofed attic, gun with a single bullet loaded into the chamber in the right-hand drawer of the desk.
Free State of Jones is a real good movie. Badly cut in post, but a lot of shit is these days, has anyone noticed? They probably really rush post these days. Some executive all "They HAVE computers, Larry! Fuck those nerds, I know the program does it for them. I want it out of the can by Friday or you're all laid the fuck off."
That's funny to think about, but who knows what the truth ever really is. Anyway, great movie.
--JL
Really, though, I just like typing. That's all this is. The internet is an unforgivable cesspool and nothing I say is ever going to make it even the least bit better, but I sure love to punch the keys on a keyboard and watch the words go across the blank space. Even if told to stop, even if the act were declared punishable by torture unto expiration, I would do what I had to in order to get my fix. Carefully muffled keys, typing gently and slowly in the dead of night in my soundproofed attic, gun with a single bullet loaded into the chamber in the right-hand drawer of the desk.
Free State of Jones is a real good movie. Badly cut in post, but a lot of shit is these days, has anyone noticed? They probably really rush post these days. Some executive all "They HAVE computers, Larry! Fuck those nerds, I know the program does it for them. I want it out of the can by Friday or you're all laid the fuck off."
That's funny to think about, but who knows what the truth ever really is. Anyway, great movie.
--JL
Friday, October 5, 2018
#30
Over dinner, someone affirmed that at bars in New York City, the gender demarcations in restrooms have fallen by the wayside, as population crush forces women into the men's room, where there is less likely to be a line thanks to the efficiency of pissing at a urinal. I said that it really only saves you perhaps fifteen seconds at the outside in a pinch, and that surely other considerations are at play. This was challenged at length, and I was (some might say, rudely) interrogated about my bathroom habits. I maintained my dignified bearing and answered truthfully that it is generally more polite and comfortable to urinate seated and that as such it is typically my habit, and that if I must needs urinate standing and am not outside, I still wait for a toilet. At a urinal, you stand in a cloud of microscopic backsplash at best, and risk actual spattering in a moment of carelessness, distraction, or as a result of a twitch or spasm. The bowl is further from you, better designed to spread the stream in every direction but back at you, and is equipped with an overhanging lip. To no avail! Urinals took the day, around that dinner table.
Also over dinner, someone stated that in witnessing a mother give suck from her breast in public to her seven-year old son, the witness has no case for judgment. I am not a judgmental person, according to personality tests, anecdotal evidence, and the testimony of peers and acquaintances, but I do not mind telling you that I disagreed immediately and in no uncertain terms. It is not the giving suck that is objectionable, nor the public nature of the act as described, nor is my concern nutritional. I am simply stating facts when I say that no hale and healthy seven-year old child with a balanced and robust relationship with their mother would feel the need to take her breast into their mouth at that age, nor would a mother with a balanced outlook on life, the world, and her own relationship with her offspring and where that ends and begins would feel the need to offer her breast to such a child, understanding that this would lead to potentially irreparable confusions. As such, while I don't advocate ripping the kid off the nipple and clapping the pair in chains, I shall not condone such deeds, nor place them within optimal relational parameters. I feel that this is simply plain good sense, but in this also, I was heartily disagreed with all around.
Well, I can only think more on these matters, and try to grow as I may. I allow that my opinions are not always sound, and do endeavor not to fall into closed-mindedness.
By the by, I found dinner excellent. Fried battered cod, pommes frites, and part of someone else's fancy grilled cheese sandwich, finished with a cup of decaffeinated coffee.
--JL
Also over dinner, someone stated that in witnessing a mother give suck from her breast in public to her seven-year old son, the witness has no case for judgment. I am not a judgmental person, according to personality tests, anecdotal evidence, and the testimony of peers and acquaintances, but I do not mind telling you that I disagreed immediately and in no uncertain terms. It is not the giving suck that is objectionable, nor the public nature of the act as described, nor is my concern nutritional. I am simply stating facts when I say that no hale and healthy seven-year old child with a balanced and robust relationship with their mother would feel the need to take her breast into their mouth at that age, nor would a mother with a balanced outlook on life, the world, and her own relationship with her offspring and where that ends and begins would feel the need to offer her breast to such a child, understanding that this would lead to potentially irreparable confusions. As such, while I don't advocate ripping the kid off the nipple and clapping the pair in chains, I shall not condone such deeds, nor place them within optimal relational parameters. I feel that this is simply plain good sense, but in this also, I was heartily disagreed with all around.
Well, I can only think more on these matters, and try to grow as I may. I allow that my opinions are not always sound, and do endeavor not to fall into closed-mindedness.
By the by, I found dinner excellent. Fried battered cod, pommes frites, and part of someone else's fancy grilled cheese sandwich, finished with a cup of decaffeinated coffee.
--JL
Thursday, October 4, 2018
#29
I was walking home from work today, just starting up a hill. Up ahead, there was a signpost, and leaning against it, a single ski, which had not been there as I descended the hill this morning. It was an old ski, its plastic and its paint plain and worn and faded with use and age. As I drew closer, I saw its brother ski on the grass beside it. Seeing the pair, my mind flashed to what price I might be able to secure for them. Then I thought, Man, I don't pick up no speed limit sign skis.
It was an absolutely phenomenal walk. I saw hawks mating and flying just to fly and the wind was cool and laden with the scent of the woods as they let go summer raiment and don their autumn cloaks. The sun was bright and clear and the sky that polarized October blue.
--JL
Wednesday, October 3, 2018
#28
It is plain fact that sadness takes root within your chest cavity and expands, leaving you unable to breathe properly and eventually killing you. Heartfelt hugs are able to drive away this deadly chill, but any sort of chest compression can do in a pinch, which is why sometimes, you just have to hug yourself.
I'm not screwing around, I read that not getting hugged will eventually kill you. Sadness can settle in your bones and cells and kill you stone dead. Being hugged keeps you alive. No one to hug? Guess you can find the nearest open grave to crawl into and wait.
Am I hugging myself, because I am sad? No, man. No.
I'm going to reread old Star Wars books for a while. The way of my people, since before the singularity.
Just Star Wars books, you ask? No! Dude! No.
I have to get up at four tomorrow, but if I have time before bed, I'm going to choose a film, and hope that by hooking my suspension of disbelief to its emotionally manipulative mechanisms, I may find my way to the shedding of tears, and some relief thereby.
Life ruined me in many ways, and one of them is that I need assistance and favorable conditions just to cry.
--JL
I'm not screwing around, I read that not getting hugged will eventually kill you. Sadness can settle in your bones and cells and kill you stone dead. Being hugged keeps you alive. No one to hug? Guess you can find the nearest open grave to crawl into and wait.
Am I hugging myself, because I am sad? No, man. No.
I'm going to reread old Star Wars books for a while. The way of my people, since before the singularity.
Just Star Wars books, you ask? No! Dude! No.
I have to get up at four tomorrow, but if I have time before bed, I'm going to choose a film, and hope that by hooking my suspension of disbelief to its emotionally manipulative mechanisms, I may find my way to the shedding of tears, and some relief thereby.
Life ruined me in many ways, and one of them is that I need assistance and favorable conditions just to cry.
--JL
Tuesday, October 2, 2018
#27
It's very strange, making posts to Blogger. I mean, even using a Google service is strange. I only do it because I make use of an Amazon service, namely, their publishing service, through which one may easily obtain digital copies of my books, and said service may be linked to a blogging service. This streamlining seemed like fair business dealings to me: like a little corn salesman, it is only fitting that I peddle my wares by front-facing free samples, the most old-school of cold sells, in hopes of snagging the odd, hopefully loyal stranger whose taste buds seek the nourishment I provide, and are willing to pay for something to take home and enjoy in their own way.
I myself am just such a queer wanderer; the type of person who hopes to stumble upon something like GweenBrick, reads it with deep enjoyment, and thinks it is important. I am proud to share a shitty platform with such works. Remember geocities? Remember Ulli?
The fossil known as Blogger, though. Man. I tried to let the new, rebranded Google Ads do its thing on Factually Pointless; do you see ads? I don't know. I don't think it worked. But it won't confirm or deny, and refuses to allow for further inputs.
Encouraged to create and link to a Google+ (Google Plus?) profile, I have done so, yet trying to explore Google+ defies analogy.
Well, that's not quite true. Navigating the haunted asshole that is Google+ is in fact nostalgic to me, simultaneously evoking 2003-era forums and websites upon which assorted clips of video pornography could be had for free, in layout and in navigation. But that's...wrong, isn't it, for something purportedly meant to be one of those services that link people together in a savvy, utile way in this day and age, wherein social media's sigil is burnt into the very heavens by the dark power of the heartless sorcerers that helm its throbbing temples?
Whatever their game, for something that seems to be designed to hold its own in the bowels of that black and bloodstained pit, Google+ doesn't seem to me to be engaged in any sort of competitive thrust. I think that's deceptive, though, and I believe Gweenbrick and stuff like it, such as my own stupid homebrew trash is a big part of why--because homebrew trash needs a low-key home, a place that isn't in a shitty neighborhood, doesn't look like a punk house, smell like a punk house, or advertise itself as a punk house, but where punk shows happen; where actually nobody lives there and it's just a framework for a basement where punk shows happen in front of twenty people at a time. To underline the point, scroll down far enough, and Google+ is in fact one of those old porn websites.
Go on! Search "writing", for example, in Google+, then scroll down for a minute or so, make the auto-load work. If you're the right age, you'll feel like an old frontiersman, long hemmed in by city walls, cresting an untamed horizon once again.
This evokes a crude, hardscrabble quality that lingers about the space, which the internet has by and large lost--giving way to the polish and presentation of the well-lit avenues and great plazas where the worldwide throngs gather, the circuses spout gore, and fake bread spews in half-chewed sprays of crumb from every mouth.
Once upon a time, websites were hideous affairs, tough to decipher, much of the most interesting data presented as merely a single front page with a jaypeg of a solid block of text. Practically nobody went to them, and the people who made them were hedge wizards. Now even your cousin Larry has a nice crisp header, pop-up videos, meticulously farmed content, and a soft paywall. He was able to set it all up in twenty minutes from his phone.
I remember this one guy that talked about how he got into fucking dolphins. I'm talking about swimming into the shallows of the bay to service the males with his hands to "shotgun blast" completion (long before this factoid enjoyed a high vogue) and let the females milk his johnson with their "prehensile, rippling vaginal walls, which created almost a suction as they powerfully massaged." I'm paraphrasing, but accurately, I think, as the pale yellow of his website, the careful distribution of his paragraphs, and his even, clinical tone have burned themselves into my memory.
As far as I know, while Twitter and Facebook may try to get you to try and pay a robot for sex, they mostly take the trouble to filter out virus-laden porn-pots with nipples right in the trap-frame. In Google+, all the edges may be crisp and feature no black lines, the text may not be trapped within and partially cut by unsightly table-frames or random bullet-points, but it manages to remind me of extremely rough, gigantic music files straining through your speakers as patches of comic sans shakily load around a broken image.
And it feels good. Like the sort of place where people aren't watching you too close so they can be the first to ram their yells down your throat and shame you into a wearied subjugation. Like a place where some weird, broken, unsalable shit can thrive, without a pressure economy and an aesthetics of competitive performance, be it by chaos trolls or by purity trolls, and simply be there for the weird, broken, unsalable people to find it, to make their lonely paths seem less so. I grew up turning over the web's logs to note the fungal ecology and watch the insect life crawl. It's good to contribute to such an ecosystem, when the woods have changed so much, and gone so sterile.
That's worth something ineffable to me, sad and pathetic as it is for the chumps in charge of making something that exists in 2018. I doff my cap to the team, and hope whatever changes may come, the floorboards may stay loose, and the grit remain wherever it can. I like a bit of broken drywall, some mysteriously stained carpet, and naked black cables strung along a wall. I like the low disintegrated, the tattered, the merely serviceable.
Am I using Netscape Navigator? Or are maggots eating my eyes in my fucking grave? Either way, I'm comfortable.
*
Okay, peace out everybody. I have to go figure out how to listen to the new Li'l Wayne album without paying for it or signing up for any services. I used to be capable when it came to these matters! Alas, things creep up on one, and the cool, edgy, thieving parts of the brain calcify with age before anything else. But at least I don't buy records.
My age group got conned into purchasing records somehow--records--and the players with which to scratch them with needles. We, who once scoffed at the costly, dust-collecting husks our forebears endured, those ancient and derelict compact discs. We, whose hacked iPods groaned with the weight of effortless discographies.
Our parents were the last suckers, we boasted to one another--even before the Cloud.
It's a different world, we said.
--JL
I myself am just such a queer wanderer; the type of person who hopes to stumble upon something like GweenBrick, reads it with deep enjoyment, and thinks it is important. I am proud to share a shitty platform with such works. Remember geocities? Remember Ulli?
The fossil known as Blogger, though. Man. I tried to let the new, rebranded Google Ads do its thing on Factually Pointless; do you see ads? I don't know. I don't think it worked. But it won't confirm or deny, and refuses to allow for further inputs.
Encouraged to create and link to a Google+ (Google Plus?) profile, I have done so, yet trying to explore Google+ defies analogy.
Well, that's not quite true. Navigating the haunted asshole that is Google+ is in fact nostalgic to me, simultaneously evoking 2003-era forums and websites upon which assorted clips of video pornography could be had for free, in layout and in navigation. But that's...wrong, isn't it, for something purportedly meant to be one of those services that link people together in a savvy, utile way in this day and age, wherein social media's sigil is burnt into the very heavens by the dark power of the heartless sorcerers that helm its throbbing temples?
Whatever their game, for something that seems to be designed to hold its own in the bowels of that black and bloodstained pit, Google+ doesn't seem to me to be engaged in any sort of competitive thrust. I think that's deceptive, though, and I believe Gweenbrick and stuff like it, such as my own stupid homebrew trash is a big part of why--because homebrew trash needs a low-key home, a place that isn't in a shitty neighborhood, doesn't look like a punk house, smell like a punk house, or advertise itself as a punk house, but where punk shows happen; where actually nobody lives there and it's just a framework for a basement where punk shows happen in front of twenty people at a time. To underline the point, scroll down far enough, and Google+ is in fact one of those old porn websites.
Go on! Search "writing", for example, in Google+, then scroll down for a minute or so, make the auto-load work. If you're the right age, you'll feel like an old frontiersman, long hemmed in by city walls, cresting an untamed horizon once again.
This evokes a crude, hardscrabble quality that lingers about the space, which the internet has by and large lost--giving way to the polish and presentation of the well-lit avenues and great plazas where the worldwide throngs gather, the circuses spout gore, and fake bread spews in half-chewed sprays of crumb from every mouth.
Once upon a time, websites were hideous affairs, tough to decipher, much of the most interesting data presented as merely a single front page with a jaypeg of a solid block of text. Practically nobody went to them, and the people who made them were hedge wizards. Now even your cousin Larry has a nice crisp header, pop-up videos, meticulously farmed content, and a soft paywall. He was able to set it all up in twenty minutes from his phone.
I remember this one guy that talked about how he got into fucking dolphins. I'm talking about swimming into the shallows of the bay to service the males with his hands to "shotgun blast" completion (long before this factoid enjoyed a high vogue) and let the females milk his johnson with their "prehensile, rippling vaginal walls, which created almost a suction as they powerfully massaged." I'm paraphrasing, but accurately, I think, as the pale yellow of his website, the careful distribution of his paragraphs, and his even, clinical tone have burned themselves into my memory.
As far as I know, while Twitter and Facebook may try to get you to try and pay a robot for sex, they mostly take the trouble to filter out virus-laden porn-pots with nipples right in the trap-frame. In Google+, all the edges may be crisp and feature no black lines, the text may not be trapped within and partially cut by unsightly table-frames or random bullet-points, but it manages to remind me of extremely rough, gigantic music files straining through your speakers as patches of comic sans shakily load around a broken image.
And it feels good. Like the sort of place where people aren't watching you too close so they can be the first to ram their yells down your throat and shame you into a wearied subjugation. Like a place where some weird, broken, unsalable shit can thrive, without a pressure economy and an aesthetics of competitive performance, be it by chaos trolls or by purity trolls, and simply be there for the weird, broken, unsalable people to find it, to make their lonely paths seem less so. I grew up turning over the web's logs to note the fungal ecology and watch the insect life crawl. It's good to contribute to such an ecosystem, when the woods have changed so much, and gone so sterile.
That's worth something ineffable to me, sad and pathetic as it is for the chumps in charge of making something that exists in 2018. I doff my cap to the team, and hope whatever changes may come, the floorboards may stay loose, and the grit remain wherever it can. I like a bit of broken drywall, some mysteriously stained carpet, and naked black cables strung along a wall. I like the low disintegrated, the tattered, the merely serviceable.
Am I using Netscape Navigator? Or are maggots eating my eyes in my fucking grave? Either way, I'm comfortable.
*
Okay, peace out everybody. I have to go figure out how to listen to the new Li'l Wayne album without paying for it or signing up for any services. I used to be capable when it came to these matters! Alas, things creep up on one, and the cool, edgy, thieving parts of the brain calcify with age before anything else. But at least I don't buy records.
My age group got conned into purchasing records somehow--records--and the players with which to scratch them with needles. We, who once scoffed at the costly, dust-collecting husks our forebears endured, those ancient and derelict compact discs. We, whose hacked iPods groaned with the weight of effortless discographies.
Our parents were the last suckers, we boasted to one another--even before the Cloud.
It's a different world, we said.
--JL
Monday, October 1, 2018
#26
It is Monday, October first. Where I am, it was a wet and gray day. I have walked the family dog twice, once in the rain and once in the drizzle. I have eaten small, simply prepared meals featuring chicken meat as protein, a few pieces of fruit, and drunk plain water and black coffee. I have read quietly, tickled the family piano, and blown on both my trumpet and my cornet. Been losing my chops on the horn and getting them back for ten years now, after diligently playing in school bands for eight.
Seventeen years ago today, also a Monday, the first Achewood strip posted. The fateful year of our lord two thousand and one, when I was on the cusp of adolescence.
I didn't do a thing.
--JL
Seventeen years ago today, also a Monday, the first Achewood strip posted. The fateful year of our lord two thousand and one, when I was on the cusp of adolescence.
I didn't do a thing.
--JL
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)