#71

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

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

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

--JL

#70

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

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

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

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

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

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


--JL

#69

My heart has been calmer lately. Overall.

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

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

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

Gotta learn, and relearn, how to forgive. 

Gotta suffer. Quietly,

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--JL

#68

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

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

--JL

#67

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

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

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

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

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

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

I dunno, some shit like that. 


--JL

#66

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

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

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


--JL

#65

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

*

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

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

*

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

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


--JL

#64

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

I might say similar stuff around Christmas.

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

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


--JL

#63

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

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

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

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

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


--JL

#62

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What matters is the seeds.

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

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

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


--JL

#61

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

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

*

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

*

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

*

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

*

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

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


--JL

#60

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


--JL

#59

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

*

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

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

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

Too many books, folks. Too much bullshit. 

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

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

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

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

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

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


--JL

#58

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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


--JL

#57

I am sick. I've been sick, and I'm still sick. That's all. Stupid cold. Looking forward to getting better.


--JL

#56

I guess it's logical that readership would drop amidst unannounced weekends and broken promises. That saddens me, but honestly, not enough to keep yesterday's promise, which was deferred once already from the day  before. Feeling...loyal yet?

By way of apology, I shall still not show you a photograph of myself, for reasons detailed at length here. However! Here is a self-portrait, circa 2010.

What kind of man am I? Who the fuck knows. READ my BOOKS and maybe you can tell me. Did you know they're in paperback now? Well, they fucking are.

*

Wait, is readership down because of the midterms? Voting isn't hard, fuckers! You did or did not do your duty and now all you can do is try to live a good life. Quit stressing and distract yourself with my tight, sweet, and deliciously short books. The paperbacks only cost seven dollars. Seven fucking dollars!

Look, I will throw you guys a bone. The first two people to email me a shipping address, well, I'll buy my own books and send them to you myself after they get to me, and I will draw a special picture for you inside, and sign it. I do not plan on signing a lot of my own books in my lifetime, so this is a pretty good deal if I ever make anything of myself!

Okay. I have a work seminar to sit through and then I will go and see a friend. Vote or don't, it's literally nothing to me. I voted, and if you didn't, that's fine. It makes you easy to ignore.


--JL

#55

Fuck man, I left this too late. I don't wanna write about friendship right now. I mean, I do, but I'm so tired and sleepy. My little brother drove back into town to vote and we went out and I had the largest dinner I have had in some time. Then we and my dad talked about various subjects. It was great, and the time flew.

Today I scraped the freaking bejarbles out of the back of my thumb, took a big chunk out right below the nail and a bigger, deeper chunk right about at the knuckle. It didn't hurt at the moment, when I was going like a whirlwind in the dishpit at work, so I thought to ignore it, but it wouldn't quit bleeding and after filling two disposable rubber gloves with blood, it sure did fucking hurt. It hurts now. They are gross and ugly. I wonder how they will scar. My hands don't show scar very much; all my knuckle scars, for example, fade together into a sort of shadow. You have to know where to look to find any individual scar, but you can pick out dozens if you try. Burns, slices, bites, stings, scrapes, punctures, and blunt traumas. Life is a party.

Okay gotta go to bed some bullshit about friendship tomorrow I am proud of my scars like any good boy should be even though they show that I am something of a dimwit ok peace


--JL

#54

I took a weekend, huh? Didn't plan it, but according to physics, making a double-post would naturally incline me towards taking two days off on a row.  And what I did (besides work, and stuff I'll get to later in the post) is make a present for you! You just have to give me seven dollars, first.

Paperback versions of my books! I made new covers so they would be different than the kindle versions and everything. Seven dollars. Seven dollars is, by my lights, a reasonable, honest, and round price, and if you give me seven of your dollars, I will love them forever. Six would have been too cute.

*

One reason I didn't make posts is, of course, immediately after I wrote about friendlessness and abandonment, people came out of the woodwork to make me feel loved and wanted. No one I know reads this blog because while I might mention offhand that I shit out a blog, I do not share links, or generate traffic by word of mouth*, so it was a classic case of screaming into the Void and the Void demonstrating that it contains a universe which can, at times, gently move one of its threads in order to make an idiot know that he is needlessly squaring his own misery.

So when I wrote that I have no friends, I was being way rough on myself and on my, you know, friends.

It would have been more precise to say that my oldest friends have scattered to the winds, some with the possibility of  eventual reunion and some most likely not. It would have been more precise to say that the friends I had made in the years when I was with my ex-betrothed were really mostly her friends, or so their general silence and uneasy tones towards me after I ended things (things were real bad) made me feel like they cared nothing for me. This was compounded by other factors, and when my next partner (a narcissist who had me cut everyone out of my life except for her and my parents, and she wouldn't have had me seeing them either if she'd had things entirely her way) started to get me acting so crazy last spring, I doubt those who did bear me affection and trust will ever speak to me again. Not that my shame would let me so much as meet their eyes, or in a couple of cases, that my fury and hurt would let words escape my locked throat. It wasn't all the narcissist! She needed something to work with, to twist and warp.

But there are a few people around these parts who it turns out still want to know me, who I was able to talk to and whose empathy and care for me, though tested, remains, and remains strong. I played Mario Kart with some of them on Friday night, and helped another couple work on a truck then sat down for real talk on Saturday night, and tomorrow or Tuesday I will see yet another for co-op games and real talk.

My outlook has morphed dramatically based on those hours, and it is difficult--raw enough to ooze--to express how much the words and gestures exchanged during those hours meant to me. The preceding paragraph doesn't sound like much, but it was everything. My last partner is still lurking in the back of my head, insisting that no one can be trusted, promising me that I am truly alone, that I am abandoned.

Not true.

Those who have had their lives turned upside down and inside out by a narcissist will understand what a knife through the heart of confidence and self-conception it is. I'm not a stupid dude. The inborn talent of the narcissist is turning one's own intelligence and empathy against the other sources of life in one's existence and directing them, and every other good thing, toward themselves alone. Then they get bored, or another supply for their narcissism catches their eye, or both, and you're lucky to get out alive.

In my case, when this lady found me, I had a car, a wardrobe, a regular amount of stuff, a library of books, several instruments and an amplifier, my name on a lease, a little money in my pocket, a job, and a broken heart. When I got away, I had no car, no home, no money, less than half the books I once did, and two bags of stuff--mostly the few clothes that remained to me--one box of papers and notebooks, my trumpet, my cornet, and my acoustic bass. I don't know where my heart is, even.

For now, now that I am out, there is only horror at myself, at the lies I fed myself; at the colossal imbecility of letting myself be abused in such a fashion, horror as every memory reveals poison, as every gesture and word turns to dross and the bloody game of it all has light thrown upon its dark heart. I had no idea, really, that a person could do this to another person. 

Ah, and the feeling like a fool. Call me what you will, but feeling like a fool is, to me, worse than any physical pain I have ever felt, and I have not led a sheltered life; I am the best of friends with all manner of pain.

Friends help.

*

I'll write more about friends tomorrow! I need to go to sleep, I slept like absolute nonsense last night.

If you've been fucked with by a narcissist, even if you are a narcissist, may God bless and keep you. I am so sorry.


--JL

*(edit) this has become untrue, I have told some folks about what I make and pointed them in this direction. So what.

#53

Spring is a dangerous time for me. Most of us spend most of our lives on a set of rails, imposed by circumstance and held to through our own will. The designs of others come into and out of play, needs and duties tug, perhaps a switch of rails is needed every now and again, or a dramatic once. 

Some of us are not so good with the business of staying on the rails. Some of us get off. Off the rails, the undergrowth is dense, and maybe you can't ever go back to the old rails. Maybe it's not so sure a thing you find some new rails. And everywhere, amongst the twisted roots and dead leaves, the bones of those who don't. The best you got for signposts, out there, off the map.

Used to work at this Chinese place. The boss's husband was an officious, ignorant, busybodied skinflinted little prick. I've known worse dudes, way worse, but this dude was a wet shit. I only kept my job because he was a little scared of me, as he wouldn't have tolerated a lot of my nonsense--chiefly, putting my feet up and reading a book when there weren't any customers in-house or orders to take, and also complaining immediately and saying no to his face if he said something stupid or told me to do anything ridiculous. These were regular things, with him.

Dude was nice to me sometimes, though, and we did have some laughs together. Yet he also sold me my first lemon, a terrible old Plymouth van that barely wanted to start and whose muffler fell off after about a week, which was a fucking bullshit move. But! I never signed the thing over to myself, so when I left it parked in the apartment lot where I lived, and the city towed it, it was him who got hit with the real fucking bullshit. He made noises at me about paying him, but let me tell you, I ignored him completely. His wife ended up making me give him a little out of each paycheck for a while just so he'd shut his mouth about firing me or whatever. I got paid cash under the table, so I couldn't really argue that much, short of quitting, and since I could do the job hungover every day, I wasn't much interested in scanning the market and putting my best foot forward.

No, my interests lay in drinking and smoking myself to death, passing the time by fucking my girlfriend, watching movies every day, playing Super Smash Brothers, and reading the rest of the time. Sometimes I dropped acid, or consumed some other hallucinogen--I was tripping on acid and sitting alone at my typewriter at the moment of J.D. Salinger's death. I wrote a lot of shitty poetry. The bits worth polishing, by the way, survived and made it into one of my books. I scribbled and slam-typed hundreds and hundreds of pages, but only sixty-four are left standing, much amended, and one's the title page.

Thought this was all okay, for my part. Probably the absurd confidence that I would soon  be recognized for my vast, unprecedented talents and thrust into a new life took a lot of the edge off.

Man, I hope that's funny to you, because I really just want to rub my face until it vanishes when I think about that. Is there anything more risible than a young writer who has rejected writerly society, secretly convinced that one day, they will beg and plead for him to assume the mantle of literary lion which he so richly deserves, and which he would wear so well? But no! I would never give those...those phonies the satisfaction!

Ah, youth. 

Punched out of work one fine Spring day with fresh money in my pocket, though less than what I would have made if I hadn't had to pay that fucking guy money I shouldn't have had to pay him. A half-shift at the Chinese place was always six hours, ten or eleven to four or five and four to ten or five to eleven. Off at five, all high on the money and in a good mood, I thought I'd have a drink at the bar like a gentleman before going home. I did  not ever do this. Usually I went straight home, where I would drink at a wooden table by the kitchen window. If I did go to a bar, it would be with my girlfriend, and usually at least one other friend, who cared more about bars than we did.

Had the barman draw me a pint of Two-Hearted, and settled down to read my book at the bar. By the time I was into my second a little bit, a big old fellow sat for a chat, weighing in at least deuce-eighty and aged almost seventy, but still hale, agreeable, breathing well, sound of mind, and of good cheer and friendly disposition. He had a large-cheeked, florid, bright-eyed face behind his big aviator-style glasses, messy white hair, and an affable way of talking. He made conversation by noting that it wasn't often he saw a fellow reading at the bar, in a tone that indicated comradeship rather than the xenophobia of the barely literate, which dissolved my rigid mistrust of anyone older than me that wasn't a dead writer or certain sets of living musicians (after working as a musician a bit*, I now mistrust every living musician.)

He was a computer whiz but from the day. Without revealing too much,  he was one of those dudes that had run the huge old computers that cost two billion smackers, ran hotter than a volcanic chute, and couldn't do the thousandth part of what an IBM would be doing in just a decade and change, let alone what your pocket rectangle can do. Dude had his hands in it from the start, and he told me many fascinating stories from the old days, and I was only too happy to listen, interjecting when I felt I could with some question or witticism or to show that I was listening and relating. He was a friendly dude with a good way about  him, and I was being as courteous and erudite as I could. We were having a nice time.

Then comes the first break in my memory, somewhere after the fourth beer. I hadn't eaten anything in hours; I meant to go home after one drink. 

Next thing I remember I am running back and forth in the bar, yelling and singing something unintelligible, but filled with a ferocious kind of joy. The old fellow's smile was gone, he was shaking his head, torso twisted around on his barstool to regard me gravely. I noticed this, but it in no way dampened me or slowed me down. Another blank spot, and we're at the door of the bar, he's handing me bus fare and actually looking a little alarmed, telling me to just go home, get home and lie down. I brashly assured him that I would, I would, of course I would, couldn't wait to!

Another blank, and the next thing I am aware of is just finishing a word, my finger in my boss's husband's face. No idea what I said to him, but I had put my face about two inches away from him to say it. He looked completely bowled over, and just started moving his head slowly from side to side. "You gotta go, Joe," he intoned slowly. "You gotta go."

Drawing my lips back from my teeth, I growled silky through a rage I hadn't realized I'd been feeling, let alone acting on. "Okay, man. I will. I will."

Yet another gap. I'm getting off the bus, laughing hard, laughing my ass off. It was way before my stop, barely halfway home. At the time I didn't know why I'd gotten off so early; it is fairly easy to deduce that I had done something to get myself kicked off the bus, something which certainly had never happened to me before. Don't like the memory of that laugh. It had grown dark. I started walking, feeling like some kind of king. 

Flashes, now. I found myself trespassing on a pharmaceutical company's private property--no fucking memory of jumping a fence and wading through some kind of mudfield just to get someplace I wasn't supposed to be, but there I was. I don't remember leaving, either. I remember staring at a traffic light with my mouth open. I remember screaming--fucking screaming, long wordless shrieks like to break glass, tearing at my throat, at a dude walking his dog. I know that dude didn't do anything to me. I have no idea why I did that to him. He kept his head down and kept walking. I would have done the same, some fucking nutball piece of shit in torn muddy jeans screaming blue devil in the darkness so hard he leans over and balls his fists. After that, nothing until opening the front door.

Got home so late that my girlfriend was home. She had been on shift when I got off, must have witnessed my screaming at our boss, and got home before me. I had wandered considerably after the bus, more meanderingly and slowly than I thought. She was waiting, along with my best friend. I had not been picking up my phone.

Their eyes, their wide scared eyes--they both have such light blue, such expressive eyes, eyes I knew so well, eyes so filled with pain and fear. All on me. By me, for me, because of me. If we exchanged words in that moment, or after, I have since forgotten them. But I will never forget their faces, their postures, most especially, their eyes, as I walked through that door.

Would have preferred to walk into four splinter bullets shattering into my torso and genitals than to walk into those eyes.

*

Don't ever be like me. Don't suffer people like me in your life. Shit like this, much more like it, and some even worse, is why I am a ruined nervous wreck with no friends**.


--JL


*roadied under circumstances I'll go into sometime; been in a few bands. Bad scenes, ranging from mere tomfoolery to actual abusive situations. I still make music all alone. Maybe someday if I make some more recordings I will share. The recordings I have, I don't know what decisions to make about them yet. But I have been playing music since I was a toddler; some of my earliest memories are of a musical daycare I attended and have always loved fooling around on pianos and xylophones, loved whistling and singing. I played trumpet and tuba in middle and high school, taught myself bass, drums, harmonica, and guitar, and have fooled around on countless weird electronic instruments. That's why I mention on some days off that I played some instruments. 

**my ex is still my friend, and time has put this all behind us. I have many friends. I am simply too often fool enough to forget that. Frankly, that paragraph is profoundly stupid in every way.

#52

I'm one of those people who have left all their friends behind, or been left by them. With me it's a mixture, as it may be for most people. I wouldn't know.

What's there to say? I saved a few of their lives, shared whatever I had with all of them. Most did not share in kind. Some did.

With some, I dropped out of sight when I couldn't bear it any longer. Some dropped from mine, I assume for similar reasons. Now it's quiet, and I'm back where I started; they are sand on the wind, gone, scattered.

I know a few locations; Denver, Madison, Chicago, somewhere near Northampton, some city in New Jersey, somewhere in Thailand, Kyoto, Caracas, Rome, St. Petersburg, San Francisco, Havana, New York, Seattle, Paris. Some I forget, some I don't know. Some are here. Our paths don't cross. I stick to the shadows when I walk and work in the back of a building. I stay home.

Some people are dead to you, and you're dead to some people. No bodies have been buried, but this is death all the same. And if their eyes met mine one random chance? What would they see? What do dead eyes reflect off one another? 

Ghosting. So apt. All of us restless in our graves, all of us subject to running into someone we left for dead.


--JL