#88

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

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

Enjoy your holidays.


--JL

#87

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


--JL

#86

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

What they generally get is something else. 

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

Good night!


--JL

#85

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

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

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

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


--JL

#84

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

*

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

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

I took the cover photo myself!

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

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

That's all I feel like saying! 


--JL

*cooking. I am a cook. 

#83

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

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


--JL

#82

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

*

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

*

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

*

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

As soon as my clothes come out of the dryer. 

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


--JL

#81

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's my teeth! For now.


--JL

#80

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


--JL

#79

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

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

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

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

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


--JL

#78

Been thinking about feces today. I'll elaborate.

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

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

Other considerations (not exhaustive):

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

*

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

*

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

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

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

*

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

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

*

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


--JL

#77

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

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

Well, at least I vote.

*

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

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

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

*

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

Happy seventy-seven.


--JL

#76

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

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

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

*

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

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

*

No more today! 

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

Wait!

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

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

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

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

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

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

--JL

#75

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

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

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


--JL

#74

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

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

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

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

Have a beautiful evening, folks.


--JL

#73

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

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

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

Bullshit! Ugh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

--JL

#72

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

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

--JL