Immigrant shit is weird; to be constantly discussed in the abstract is psychically pervasive and usually alienating. I mean, it's on all the paperwork. I am, and I promise you I am not alone in this, extremely aware that I am an alien, although it is a piece of information that I could always choose to keep secret. I have absolutely no accent and hell, I've been naturalized for a decade. I attended three nonconsecutive years of elementary school and all of middle and high school in the town I live in now, where I've spent most of my adult life in the culinary and automotive job economies. I been all over this land and I been to some far-out places on this globe, and my position is this: U.S.A. all the way, we do some very fucked up shit and we are wrong wrong wrong a lot on a lot of stuff but this is the best country in the world and that's final. Venezuela was fucked up yesterday and it'll be fucked up tomorrow no matter who sends how many troops where or who stole what vs. who gets to steal the next round or which lobster with its claws rubber-banded shut is "president".
Basically, you couldn't get me to leave the U.S., I don't care how that sounds, it's true of everyone who lives here whether they admit it or not, and if it isn't, they either have the privilege to leave or they don't comprehend in the slightest how lucky they are to lack privilege in the most privileged nation on earth.
Native soil is a complex idea with complex feelings attached, native soil is in the blood and in the heart and in the outlook, I'd never deny it. Nevertheless, I swore an oath, and I meant it with every fiber of my being. I'm an American that was born in Venezuela. I took advantage of an opportunity and came on over, working hard to capitalize on it. From the Bering land bridge to today, that is how it has been done. Fucked up shit happened every step of the way because people are fucked up, and glorious beautiful fantastic miraculous shit happened every step of the way because people are all those things and even more, too.
It is all just stories. Inheritance is inheritance. How will you deal with your inheritance in order to write your story? All you can do is make choices.
*
So, Venezuela? Fuckin' whatever! I would see it depeopled and given back to nonhuman nature, like the rest of the planet. I want to die in the woods, ascending in the certainty that all around me, the earth is sighing as it is relieved of a terrible burden.
*
It'd be cool if Olympic medals were presented with great hearty cheer but perhaps too literal of a turn of phrase. "Here's your gold prize for doing the longest jump! You're the best jumper at jumping far! Hurray! Best jumper award, right round your neck! Yeah!"
--JL
Tuesday, January 29, 2019
Saturday, January 26, 2019
#105
Somehow it doesn't really strike me as tremendously eerie that when I am in my room, where tall stacks of books line each and every wall, more lined up in a booksnake longer than I am tall, more in little unobtrusive shrine-stacks in the floor space (my room contains, aside from books and not counting the closet: a little couch that I sleep on, my desk [sizable, white glass and titanium, the shape of an irregular bean, higher-end Ikea {on its surface; four stacks books, two stacks notebooks, one stack fresh new hard back writing pads, a clipboard with my collection of looseleaf materials | a printout of a short story by Chris Onstad | printouts of loose poems by various authors used in an extended poetry workshop I attended the summer I left high school, printouts of some of the poems I utilized in order to teach high school kids how to write poetry and in some cases pay attention for even one single dang second | a few scattered papers tossed behind the laptop of some kind of adult life importance I am and have been neglecting |, three CDs in their jewel cases, a little box of gray pastels, a little box of color pastels, a little box of artists' charcoal, and a fourteen-inch-by-eight-inch plain aluminum mesh tray with dividers, containing all my pens and pencils and mechanical pencils and brushes and erasers and markers and colored pencils and a kazoo} a rolled-up yoga mat behind the door, two nightstands at either end of the couch [on the surface of both: bookstacks and lamps, and respectively between them, some trumpet mouthpieces, three stainless steel dinner spoons, my copy in pamphlet version of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America, and a framed photograph of me at age six with my arms around my two-year-old brother's shoulders] a little wicker trash can under my desk, an unopened bag of Soylent I let my friend foist upon me next to the chair I am sitting on, a designated clothes-bearing chair, my one small bookshelf [which aside from books and three bookstacks piled atop, bears a third lamp, my sketchbooks and artist pads, a Boston-brand lead pointer in its box {New Metal Model! Simplified Design, More Lead Protection} a little bottle of tea tree oil, and a fistful of bookmarks], my acoustic bass in its soft case, my no-guard bokken in a corner, and a rug--so the floor space is quite ample), everywhere the eye looks, it is looking at the echoes of the dead, a plenitude of concrete ghosts; dead trees, souls gone on, echoes frozen, surrounding me.
I believe in ghosts, of course; they simply do not bother me in the slightest.
Anymore.
*
You know what I didn't feel like doing? Describing the lamps. I mean, who gives a fuck, anyway.
Aw, I'll tell you all about my lamps someday, never fret. Maybe I will also reveal the two objects that hang on my walls. Describing my rug, well. It's a rug, and it is on the floor. There are colors and patterns in the weave. Boom.
The desk has no drawers, but I have no idea how to fit a lack of something into the above. Ah, but if I have brushes, where are my paints, truly keen readers may have asked themselves*. A story for another day. I keep my horns in the basement. The mouthpieces are old sizes I don't use anymore and one of my small concessions to decoration, because that's what I think is a good decoration: small pieces of metal I used to blow a lot of air through.
Look. All that matters--all that matters--is I got to write, and will momentarily publish, "a fistful of bookmarks".
*
Man, you know so much about me now. This post has revealed me like none that preceded it, and I think I talked about my pissing habits and crying on my floor while the family dog licked me. No, I definitely did that. Being a freestyle diarist is a phenomenal, rewarding enterprise. Never know what you'll find about yourself as you expose it.
--JL
*no doubt truly keen readers are capable of noting many, many lacks, most I am probably blissfully unaware of, some of which I have my reasons for maintaining. Truly keen writers might look around their own rooms and try this for themselves; you might have fun, doubtlessly learn something, and hopefully generate something you don't hate. I know how it is, brethren. Godspeed always.
Friday, January 25, 2019
#104
Broke my cool yesterday. Broke out the bolds and the underlines. Haven't done that since I was a teenager.
But you know, as a diasporic minority within a minority living in Amerikkka
*
Hahahaha no no I am so sorry. Oh hell, I'm sorry. I've actually said shit like that out loud before, outrageous bullshit not so different from the above--not like that, not so you could actually hear the whinepreach scratch across the inside of your skull, but I've been insufferable before, sure. I could have made that sentence much longer, I know exactly how.
It is super easy. Intoxicating, even. Isn't righteousness always such a heady brew?
So is rage! Hot tip: people can always tell your rage, no matter how polite you sound. I don't know why anyone bothers to try and kid anyone else about rage. You can hide a lot of different kinds of anger, but not rage. You can shunt your rage and hold it down, but it will always tell because it is not a thing that can be denied or mastered. On top of that, everything about the human animal is calibrated to sense rage without fail, even in writing, unless someone is legitimately not paying attention to you one iota.
Rage. Look it up! I don't know why I bothered with that whole paragraph, aside from the pleasure of typing it. The definition is really more than adequate.
*
What I mean to say is, I got a real particular angle on that mess, lots of personal and specific as well as broad and general, and I still don't know shit. I'm not there, see? I was. Now, I'm not. That's reality. That's the actual point.
Go yourself, if you care so much, if you want to see for yourself and act righteously once you know for sure what to do. That's easy, right? No? I'm being unreasonable? Hyperbolic?
You know, fuck that. You want to act righteous, be righteous, instead of just sounding good? You put your body where your mouth is. Put your fucking skin in it. That's it. No disambiguation.
Make yourself the kind of person who can do something about situations and then go do it. If you really care about the problem, you'll think of a way to do it. If you find that you won't put in the effort, maybe you'll find you didn't care that much in the first place, and hey. Maybe that's okay, because you can't care about every little thing that happens on this planet because that will kill you.
Find out what you truthfully and deeply care about and fix it, do it, go it, be it. You don't have to yell on the internet basically ever. I'm sorry that I did. All caps and everything. I used the caps lock key. I did. I admit this. I know I made some people feel bad, and this is something I regret deeply. I shall endeavor to ignore things that raise my blood pressure in future, rather than ragereading twitter till I can't think over the roaring. The subsequent public gnashing and howling was directed at deliberately disingenuous operators and the babblers who midlessly parrot them, not honest people searching for answers, but the thing about salvos is that they do area damage.
An alternative to screaming on the internet, which is not productive and which I apologize for, for real, and an alternative to abandoning your life to a cause that isn't yours, is to learn as much as you can about stuff you don't know about, furnishing yourself with as much raw data and differing opinion as you can find. Hopefully, enough that you become able to speak intelligently on what you do know, and clearly interpret new information. This way, you will know when you are out of your depth. This way, you stand a better chance of figuring out when someone is lying to you, or doesn't know what they're talking about.
*
Alright, enough about yesterday. It is today, people! It is today.
*
Well, real quick: the whole "As a ____, my impeccable opinion/special position packs about six billion cc's more hot dick that your limp whatever 'cause I was born for the Discourse, b*tch" can eat a moratorium starting several centuries ago, but these days it is a screaming plague.
For real, I'm starting to read every sentence that starts with "As a ____," in the South Park Rob Schneider Fake Trailers Voice. Can't help it. Soon I will hear it conversation, superimposed over the speaker.
*
Yeah, seems like I'm having a ton of fun being negative lately. Something must be off in my diet or something.
Truly I'm feeling quite cheerful, but every time I hit the keys the old sass just comes pouring out. In the end there's no denying that it is simply a crazy business, sitting down to type.
People like to act like the generation of the written word is some mystical sacred superego joist of civilization thing, and some of it has that in it, but all writing is instinctive and is aimed at the instincts, so really when I go about my business I'm letting out the animal inside, and just because the animal has a fanatical love of language and ideas (and how language is ideas) does not mean he wants to sip tea from fine china and wear expertly felted hats. He wants to fuck and kill like any good organism.
--JL
But you know, as a diasporic minority within a minority living in Amerikkka
*
Hahahaha no no I am so sorry. Oh hell, I'm sorry. I've actually said shit like that out loud before, outrageous bullshit not so different from the above--not like that, not so you could actually hear the whinepreach scratch across the inside of your skull, but I've been insufferable before, sure. I could have made that sentence much longer, I know exactly how.
It is super easy. Intoxicating, even. Isn't righteousness always such a heady brew?
So is rage! Hot tip: people can always tell your rage, no matter how polite you sound. I don't know why anyone bothers to try and kid anyone else about rage. You can hide a lot of different kinds of anger, but not rage. You can shunt your rage and hold it down, but it will always tell because it is not a thing that can be denied or mastered. On top of that, everything about the human animal is calibrated to sense rage without fail, even in writing, unless someone is legitimately not paying attention to you one iota.
Rage. Look it up! I don't know why I bothered with that whole paragraph, aside from the pleasure of typing it. The definition is really more than adequate.
*
What I mean to say is, I got a real particular angle on that mess, lots of personal and specific as well as broad and general, and I still don't know shit. I'm not there, see? I was. Now, I'm not. That's reality. That's the actual point.
Go yourself, if you care so much, if you want to see for yourself and act righteously once you know for sure what to do. That's easy, right? No? I'm being unreasonable? Hyperbolic?
You know, fuck that. You want to act righteous, be righteous, instead of just sounding good? You put your body where your mouth is. Put your fucking skin in it. That's it. No disambiguation.
Make yourself the kind of person who can do something about situations and then go do it. If you really care about the problem, you'll think of a way to do it. If you find that you won't put in the effort, maybe you'll find you didn't care that much in the first place, and hey. Maybe that's okay, because you can't care about every little thing that happens on this planet because that will kill you.
Find out what you truthfully and deeply care about and fix it, do it, go it, be it. You don't have to yell on the internet basically ever. I'm sorry that I did. All caps and everything. I used the caps lock key. I did. I admit this. I know I made some people feel bad, and this is something I regret deeply. I shall endeavor to ignore things that raise my blood pressure in future, rather than ragereading twitter till I can't think over the roaring. The subsequent public gnashing and howling was directed at deliberately disingenuous operators and the babblers who midlessly parrot them, not honest people searching for answers, but the thing about salvos is that they do area damage.
An alternative to screaming on the internet, which is not productive and which I apologize for, for real, and an alternative to abandoning your life to a cause that isn't yours, is to learn as much as you can about stuff you don't know about, furnishing yourself with as much raw data and differing opinion as you can find. Hopefully, enough that you become able to speak intelligently on what you do know, and clearly interpret new information. This way, you will know when you are out of your depth. This way, you stand a better chance of figuring out when someone is lying to you, or doesn't know what they're talking about.
*
Alright, enough about yesterday. It is today, people! It is today.
*
Well, real quick: the whole "As a ____, my impeccable opinion/special position packs about six billion cc's more hot dick that your limp whatever 'cause I was born for the Discourse, b*tch" can eat a moratorium starting several centuries ago, but these days it is a screaming plague.
For real, I'm starting to read every sentence that starts with "As a ____," in the South Park Rob Schneider Fake Trailers Voice. Can't help it. Soon I will hear it conversation, superimposed over the speaker.
*
Yeah, seems like I'm having a ton of fun being negative lately. Something must be off in my diet or something.
Truly I'm feeling quite cheerful, but every time I hit the keys the old sass just comes pouring out. In the end there's no denying that it is simply a crazy business, sitting down to type.
People like to act like the generation of the written word is some mystical sacred superego joist of civilization thing, and some of it has that in it, but all writing is instinctive and is aimed at the instincts, so really when I go about my business I'm letting out the animal inside, and just because the animal has a fanatical love of language and ideas (and how language is ideas) does not mean he wants to sip tea from fine china and wear expertly felted hats. He wants to fuck and kill like any good organism.
--JL
Thursday, January 24, 2019
#103
Fine. I'll bite. You want some fucking opinions about Venezuela? You want someone to tell you what to think and feel about it even though there is but the slimmest chance that it is any of your motherfucking business or anything you could fucking hope to remotely comprehend or materially influence?
Look no god damn further.
*
It's like I just said. You don't fucking know. You don't understand Venezuelan history--did you look any up? Any at all? Did you even read the Wikipedia article? Was that utile, if you bothered?
There are no useful links. I'm not going to send you to a twenty-minute video that will succinctly and accurately sum up the situation because any such video is hollow propaganda.
Stuff like that is everywhere, the internet sits chin-deep in hideously gross oversimplifications and anti-history. I cannot comprehend why in the living devil motherfuckers consider themselves educated on a subject, matter, event, concept, text, or issue after ten minutes of reading, a conversation or two, and a half-hour of what passes for thought in such skulls.
No, I am not being an asshole! That was me being generous. Said motherfuckers usually just watch a single video, made by someone in the CIA, a troll, a communist, or a complex admixture of any of the aforementioned.
What do you truly know about past and U.S. activity in Venezuela specifically? What do you truly know about the people who live there? If it's direct witness or direct word of mouth, how big is your sample? What were their sources? How does their credibility rank, at a guess? Do you know for sure they were really there, or understand things competently themselves? If you're relying secondhand, on reporting or writing or hearsay, what were sources of the reporting, how biased their publication, who paid them, who funds the publication? Did you bother to check? Do you really know what it means to be "on the left" in that country? In that sphere of influence? What do you know about each dictator specifically? Do you know the actual, full, complete story of La Revolución Bolivariana? How about the big one, Bolívar's actual revolution, and what it accomplished, and how? You know who Andrés Bello is? You know if that's a relevant question? How about economics? How much oil, when did it become an issue, what lake does it come from, what are the problems with that? What's the other main export? The staple crop? The GDP before Chavez and what happened after? How about the GDP before Caldera? You know who Rafael Caldera was, what his policies were like? What do you know about the post-Chavez strikes? About the news on the ground day after day, month after month? You follow that news pretty carefully as it happened for the last nineteen years? You know the current "government" is the Fifth Republic, right? What can you tell me about the other four? Were there really four? Who is Aquiles Nazoa? How about Antonio Arraiz? How many native Venezuelan tribes can you name? What year was the country founded? What was Nicolás Maduro's job before he became president? What is the name of the mountain north of the capital? What is the name of the tallest waterfall in the world, and where is it? Here's a clue: it's not in fucking Cuba. If you think you know the answer--do you know its real name? What do you know about the Venezuelan prison system? The school system? About Venezuelan public transportation, Venezuelan bureaucracy, its culture, its demographics? You know there's a German mining company at the source of the largest river in the country (know its name?) fucking it up mining some gold? What company? Why German? What is the history of German naturalists exploring Venezuela and its ramifications? What year was Venezuela "discovered" and by whom? What country has supplied Venezuela with the jets for its air force? Why do Venezuelans eat so much pasta--when they can get it? Is there still racism in Venezuela? How is it different and similar to racism where you live?
Don't know where to stop, but I could go on. I could ask you questions until my fingers bleed. How many answers do you really, truly believe you possess, and if it's actually a lot, so what? That makes you right? And if you're right--fucking somehow--so what?
Hopefully you're starting to come around to my point. You don't know shit. You're not fucking qualified. And if you are, you're probably not on Twitter talking about it, you're doing a real fucking job that takes up too much time and effort for you to participate in the masturbatory punishment chatter war that is ripping apart the collective psyche. Soon we will be no more than particularly violent gibbons, screaming particularly ugly sounds.
*
Okay. Okay. Now. Please listen carefully. This part is what I really want to say.
Nothing is ever as simple as the corporate headline, the great leader, or the social alphas in your politically-charged echo chamber make it out to be. They make that shit seem simple in order to control you, which is to say, in order to use you, which is to say, to dehumanize and abuse you in order to profit off your ignorance and gain power from your manipulated acquiescence.
Whatever they are talking about, whatever they are saying, that is the game, and you are the piece.
*
Well! I don't think I actually need to write anything else except
SHUT
YOUR
TRASH
FUCKING
HOLES
ABOUT
VENEZUELA
AND
GIVE THIS A THOUGHT, NOW
EVERYWHERE YOU WEREN'T BORN, DON'T LIVE, AND DIDN'T SPILL BLOOD
I'm talking to other Venezuelan immigrants! I'm talking to immigrants at large! I'm talking to U.S. citizens! I'm talking to ALL OF YOU, EVERY LAST ONE
SHUT
UP
SHUT
UP
YOUR "DIALOGUE" IS FUCKING NOTHING
*
by all that is holy, don't you have your own problems?
--JL
Look no god damn further.
*
It's like I just said. You don't fucking know. You don't understand Venezuelan history--did you look any up? Any at all? Did you even read the Wikipedia article? Was that utile, if you bothered?
There are no useful links. I'm not going to send you to a twenty-minute video that will succinctly and accurately sum up the situation because any such video is hollow propaganda.
Stuff like that is everywhere, the internet sits chin-deep in hideously gross oversimplifications and anti-history. I cannot comprehend why in the living devil motherfuckers consider themselves educated on a subject, matter, event, concept, text, or issue after ten minutes of reading, a conversation or two, and a half-hour of what passes for thought in such skulls.
No, I am not being an asshole! That was me being generous. Said motherfuckers usually just watch a single video, made by someone in the CIA, a troll, a communist, or a complex admixture of any of the aforementioned.
What do you truly know about past and U.S. activity in Venezuela specifically? What do you truly know about the people who live there? If it's direct witness or direct word of mouth, how big is your sample? What were their sources? How does their credibility rank, at a guess? Do you know for sure they were really there, or understand things competently themselves? If you're relying secondhand, on reporting or writing or hearsay, what were sources of the reporting, how biased their publication, who paid them, who funds the publication? Did you bother to check? Do you really know what it means to be "on the left" in that country? In that sphere of influence? What do you know about each dictator specifically? Do you know the actual, full, complete story of La Revolución Bolivariana? How about the big one, Bolívar's actual revolution, and what it accomplished, and how? You know who Andrés Bello is? You know if that's a relevant question? How about economics? How much oil, when did it become an issue, what lake does it come from, what are the problems with that? What's the other main export? The staple crop? The GDP before Chavez and what happened after? How about the GDP before Caldera? You know who Rafael Caldera was, what his policies were like? What do you know about the post-Chavez strikes? About the news on the ground day after day, month after month? You follow that news pretty carefully as it happened for the last nineteen years? You know the current "government" is the Fifth Republic, right? What can you tell me about the other four? Were there really four? Who is Aquiles Nazoa? How about Antonio Arraiz? How many native Venezuelan tribes can you name? What year was the country founded? What was Nicolás Maduro's job before he became president? What is the name of the mountain north of the capital? What is the name of the tallest waterfall in the world, and where is it? Here's a clue: it's not in fucking Cuba. If you think you know the answer--do you know its real name? What do you know about the Venezuelan prison system? The school system? About Venezuelan public transportation, Venezuelan bureaucracy, its culture, its demographics? You know there's a German mining company at the source of the largest river in the country (know its name?) fucking it up mining some gold? What company? Why German? What is the history of German naturalists exploring Venezuela and its ramifications? What year was Venezuela "discovered" and by whom? What country has supplied Venezuela with the jets for its air force? Why do Venezuelans eat so much pasta--when they can get it? Is there still racism in Venezuela? How is it different and similar to racism where you live?
Don't know where to stop, but I could go on. I could ask you questions until my fingers bleed. How many answers do you really, truly believe you possess, and if it's actually a lot, so what? That makes you right? And if you're right--fucking somehow--so what?
Hopefully you're starting to come around to my point. You don't know shit. You're not fucking qualified. And if you are, you're probably not on Twitter talking about it, you're doing a real fucking job that takes up too much time and effort for you to participate in the masturbatory punishment chatter war that is ripping apart the collective psyche. Soon we will be no more than particularly violent gibbons, screaming particularly ugly sounds.
*
Okay. Okay. Now. Please listen carefully. This part is what I really want to say.
Nothing is ever as simple as the corporate headline, the great leader, or the social alphas in your politically-charged echo chamber make it out to be. They make that shit seem simple in order to control you, which is to say, in order to use you, which is to say, to dehumanize and abuse you in order to profit off your ignorance and gain power from your manipulated acquiescence.
Whatever they are talking about, whatever they are saying, that is the game, and you are the piece.
*
Well! I don't think I actually need to write anything else except
SHUT
YOUR
TRASH
FUCKING
HOLES
ABOUT
VENEZUELA
AND
GIVE THIS A THOUGHT, NOW
EVERYWHERE YOU WEREN'T BORN, DON'T LIVE, AND DIDN'T SPILL BLOOD
I'm talking to other Venezuelan immigrants! I'm talking to immigrants at large! I'm talking to U.S. citizens! I'm talking to ALL OF YOU, EVERY LAST ONE
SHUT
UP
SHUT
UP
YOUR "DIALOGUE" IS FUCKING NOTHING
*
by all that is holy, don't you have your own problems?
--JL
Wednesday, January 23, 2019
#102
It is difficult to remember for some reason, though further back my memories are clearer, almost overwhelming. I remember the two books from which I learnt my letters and colors simultaneously, as well as the objects and fonts employed in this grasping of the symbol, I remember the feel of sitting in my mother's lap and the look of her fingers as she turned the page. Later than that, but still earlier than when I am trying to remember, there is the full, deep, rich memory of first encyclopedia I ever read, a Spanish translation of The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Animals, some edition that was up to speed in the late eighties. The current American edition is what I own these days; the old book was lost in some move. No matter; I remember it with such a clarity that I really have no idea why I bothered replacing it. If I close my eyes, I can see the same illustrations with my child's eyes, sharper and clearer than mine today, richer in color and detail, larger and realer. Certain memory is more than capable trouncing the present moment.
What I am having trouble remembering is the very first novel I ever read.
*
A friend of mine insists we have the Devil to thank for the written word; would that it were so simple. Of course he is being deliberately provocative and knows full well that this is not quite so; neither can I deny him.
*
On the inside covers or blank pages of the books I have owned the longest I can find examples of my handwriting from when I was three or when I was five; my name, correctly spelled and easy to read but the letters composed of mostly wobbly angles and crumpled curves. I had good handwriting, actually the beginnings of promising penmanship, for a magic span sometime when I was nine. Then it crossed over into hurried sloppiness, still beautiful on occasion, but never neat or truly correct or consistent.
*
The novel would have had to be in English, but the problem is, it may have come from a library, and not my own collection. I can be fairly sure the International School I first attended did not supply it; like the rest of my very early childhood books, the tomes I selected at that very first, most sacred (to me, the whole place was a temple to Neo-Americo-Brittanic flat-affect employment of right angles using bright primary colors cheer if there ever was one, truly a cradle of the projected global civilization*) library were still largely children's books, even the ones in novel form, like The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett and The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster, both cornerstones of my heart. Well, moreso Phantom Tollbooth. I could read that bad boy seven times in a row and come back for more. One of the best books ever.
Memories of my first collection of short stories are easy; the first, a most precious trove which holds great power to this day, was A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh, illustrated by Ernest H. Shepard. That was followed by Kipling's Jungle Book, and various collections of children's versions of Aesop's Fables and Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur. Also, The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame, Peter Pan, by J.M. Barrie, some others in that vein. I recall also from the age of five through six beginning to read a whole raft of young adult books and children's novels, Animorphs by K.A. Applegate, the Dragon of the Lost Sea series by Laurence Yep (fuckin Boneless King is still one of the scariest things to me), Jerry Spinelli books, Star Wars books, L'Engle's Time Cycle which I have mentioned, the Chronicles of Narnia by Lewis, Patricia Wrede, Louis Sachar, Charles Dickens, Avi, Lois Lowry, Garth Nix, Brian Jacques, Jane Yolen, random stuff, starting to crawl into the adult territory sometimes. Some of these books I would collect for myself, some I would check out of the library up to eight times over the course of two years.
*
Treasure Island. That counts, I'm sure, it was Kipling that brought it to mind, and I read Kipling very early, perhaps four. Robert Louis Stevenson, a grown-up enough book. It's for young people. A novel nonetheless.
Ah, but if we're going to quibble over definitions like that, the first novel must indeed be The Phantom Tollbooth, which I did already mention and I might also need to throw in Roald Dahl's Matilda, being as which came first is a detail lost to memory. I believe. I'll try to remember.
Said goodbye to my childhood in a new way, at the age of eleven, with Stephen King's Bag of Bones, shortly followed by To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, and then, irrevocably, One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez, possibly my very favorite novel, certainly one of the most important to me.
Stories which disrupted my childhood badly were written by Franz Kafka. Yikes, dude!
Of course, there is the first book, the Book from which I would have heard my first written word, spoken aloud. Doesn't quite count, probably. Did not read that myself until a bit later, before I turned ten, and, uncharacteristically, I did not reread it until last year. It was fucking fire. Rad book, please do try it no matter how you feel about people who use it as a weapon.
On that note, The Brothers Karamazov deserves to stand amongst among the greatest works of art ever produced, and is certainly one of the greatest novels ever written, as Fyodor Dostoevsky stands in the very front ranks of novelists. I just felt like saying that. If you have only read it once, please! should you only read one book twice in your whole lifetime, let it be this one.
*
That same friend of mine, a white dude, while acknowledging my delicious ethnic ambiguity, does not let me forget that I am basically a white dude, even literally a white dude. Like the other thing, I don't quite agree, but can't say he's at all wrong.
*
Guess some people would say that the above would be my colonized mindset, abetting my oppressor. That's a whole thing to get into, but to be concise: no. Not accurate.
Another time.
--JL
*by which I mean what I understood as I read the very acclaimed book People, by Peter Spier at the age of three, along with Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak, Japanese and African folktales, classic British children's literature and nursery rhymes, Eastern European fairy stories, Greek and Russian fables, all these new favorites I was continually discovering in that beautiful little children's library up a mountain in Venezuela where the English books all hid, my first aperture into a wider, vaster world: that this planet is more compassed by a kinship than it is fragmented by a sundering.
What I am having trouble remembering is the very first novel I ever read.
*
A friend of mine insists we have the Devil to thank for the written word; would that it were so simple. Of course he is being deliberately provocative and knows full well that this is not quite so; neither can I deny him.
*
On the inside covers or blank pages of the books I have owned the longest I can find examples of my handwriting from when I was three or when I was five; my name, correctly spelled and easy to read but the letters composed of mostly wobbly angles and crumpled curves. I had good handwriting, actually the beginnings of promising penmanship, for a magic span sometime when I was nine. Then it crossed over into hurried sloppiness, still beautiful on occasion, but never neat or truly correct or consistent.
*
The novel would have had to be in English, but the problem is, it may have come from a library, and not my own collection. I can be fairly sure the International School I first attended did not supply it; like the rest of my very early childhood books, the tomes I selected at that very first, most sacred (to me, the whole place was a temple to Neo-Americo-Brittanic flat-affect employment of right angles using bright primary colors cheer if there ever was one, truly a cradle of the projected global civilization*) library were still largely children's books, even the ones in novel form, like The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett and The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster, both cornerstones of my heart. Well, moreso Phantom Tollbooth. I could read that bad boy seven times in a row and come back for more. One of the best books ever.
Memories of my first collection of short stories are easy; the first, a most precious trove which holds great power to this day, was A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh, illustrated by Ernest H. Shepard. That was followed by Kipling's Jungle Book, and various collections of children's versions of Aesop's Fables and Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur. Also, The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame, Peter Pan, by J.M. Barrie, some others in that vein. I recall also from the age of five through six beginning to read a whole raft of young adult books and children's novels, Animorphs by K.A. Applegate, the Dragon of the Lost Sea series by Laurence Yep (fuckin Boneless King is still one of the scariest things to me), Jerry Spinelli books, Star Wars books, L'Engle's Time Cycle which I have mentioned, the Chronicles of Narnia by Lewis, Patricia Wrede, Louis Sachar, Charles Dickens, Avi, Lois Lowry, Garth Nix, Brian Jacques, Jane Yolen, random stuff, starting to crawl into the adult territory sometimes. Some of these books I would collect for myself, some I would check out of the library up to eight times over the course of two years.
*
Treasure Island. That counts, I'm sure, it was Kipling that brought it to mind, and I read Kipling very early, perhaps four. Robert Louis Stevenson, a grown-up enough book. It's for young people. A novel nonetheless.
Ah, but if we're going to quibble over definitions like that, the first novel must indeed be The Phantom Tollbooth, which I did already mention and I might also need to throw in Roald Dahl's Matilda, being as which came first is a detail lost to memory. I believe. I'll try to remember.
Said goodbye to my childhood in a new way, at the age of eleven, with Stephen King's Bag of Bones, shortly followed by To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, and then, irrevocably, One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez, possibly my very favorite novel, certainly one of the most important to me.
Stories which disrupted my childhood badly were written by Franz Kafka. Yikes, dude!
Of course, there is the first book, the Book from which I would have heard my first written word, spoken aloud. Doesn't quite count, probably. Did not read that myself until a bit later, before I turned ten, and, uncharacteristically, I did not reread it until last year. It was fucking fire. Rad book, please do try it no matter how you feel about people who use it as a weapon.
On that note, The Brothers Karamazov deserves to stand amongst among the greatest works of art ever produced, and is certainly one of the greatest novels ever written, as Fyodor Dostoevsky stands in the very front ranks of novelists. I just felt like saying that. If you have only read it once, please! should you only read one book twice in your whole lifetime, let it be this one.
*
That same friend of mine, a white dude, while acknowledging my delicious ethnic ambiguity, does not let me forget that I am basically a white dude, even literally a white dude. Like the other thing, I don't quite agree, but can't say he's at all wrong.
*
Guess some people would say that the above would be my colonized mindset, abetting my oppressor. That's a whole thing to get into, but to be concise: no. Not accurate.
Another time.
--JL
*by which I mean what I understood as I read the very acclaimed book People, by Peter Spier at the age of three, along with Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak, Japanese and African folktales, classic British children's literature and nursery rhymes, Eastern European fairy stories, Greek and Russian fables, all these new favorites I was continually discovering in that beautiful little children's library up a mountain in Venezuela where the English books all hid, my first aperture into a wider, vaster world: that this planet is more compassed by a kinship than it is fragmented by a sundering.
Tuesday, January 22, 2019
#101
Penny Arcade was only three years old the first time I decided that it sucked. Didn't read it for six years. Came back around and read it for three. Quit again, came back again. I don't even think about it anymore. Reading Penny Arcade has become an autonomous process, and thinking about it a normalized part of my psychic function. Jerry Holkins' voice--not his mouth-sounds, which I have heard only briefly once, as I do not consume much of PA's video product nor have I ever attended a PAX, but his writing voice, the voice of the newspost in particular--is a distinct and powerful voice in my own head; I can converse with myself in it and pit it against other voices, I can use it to think something through as "Tycho" might, to have an argument with him as an opponent in order to seek perspective, whatever. His voice is very obviously detectable as an influence in my own writing. As surely as I know how any one of the Animorphs might react to any given situation, what they might say, how they might feel, how it would harm or help them.
This has been me dating myself. Just maudlin and worthless. Some kid I work with made me feel like a barnacle-encrusted protrusion of rock on a wasted headland where the tides wear away the shore but gently, a few grains of sand an hour, the sun tracing a thousand thousand lines across a sky which gives no shelter. The protrusion was once a mighty sea-mont, but now, I am but a riven twist of salt-chewed, crumbled stone.
That's mainly chronovertigo talking; I was only eleven and a half the first time I saw Penny Arcade, and I am a young man, not yet thirty (for a brief spell). Still, at this point, that was quite a while ago. It's incredible seeing what the past has made of what what was once your future.
--JL
Monday, January 21, 2019
#100
One hundred is not important to me. But! I think the end of double-digit posts is wild; a brief, frenzied infancy. It is wild that the posts will be three-digit posts for a long time to come. Feel no pressure to write anything special for such an occasion, though.
Matter of fact, the only reason there's a post at all is I really don't like going more than three days without putting something up. I'm tired. It was negative twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit this morning as I walked into my seventh straight shift. I have really used up a great deal of human energy over the last seven-day period. A great variety of expenditures in a great variety of fields. Many returns and gains, of course. Life. Exhausting in its quotidian richness.
Oh! And I don't have to work that eighth day. I am okay with that.
*
I said this out loud to my coworkers, duly warning them that it was going to be pretentious: one excellent perspective is to take as much comfort in paradox as in tautology.
*
See? I think that's the optimal amount of sparkle and palaver required celebrate the hundredth post, though, pray: no one pretend that I am any better than a fool, that I am ever more right than I am wrong or more knowledgeable than I am ignorant. May peace born of what understanding we may foster reign over all humankind, and may we one day come to know one another as we really truly are.
--JL
Matter of fact, the only reason there's a post at all is I really don't like going more than three days without putting something up. I'm tired. It was negative twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit this morning as I walked into my seventh straight shift. I have really used up a great deal of human energy over the last seven-day period. A great variety of expenditures in a great variety of fields. Many returns and gains, of course. Life. Exhausting in its quotidian richness.
Oh! And I don't have to work that eighth day. I am okay with that.
*
I said this out loud to my coworkers, duly warning them that it was going to be pretentious: one excellent perspective is to take as much comfort in paradox as in tautology.
*
See? I think that's the optimal amount of sparkle and palaver required celebrate the hundredth post, though, pray: no one pretend that I am any better than a fool, that I am ever more right than I am wrong or more knowledgeable than I am ignorant. May peace born of what understanding we may foster reign over all humankind, and may we one day come to know one another as we really truly are.
--JL
Thursday, January 17, 2019
#99
So what I do is I work five days and get a weekend, but my Monday is Wednesday and my Friday is Sunday. At least, that has been the way things have been able to shake out for a few weeks running, maybe even more than a month (I have a great memory but it is not chrononormative or performative, so I forget what day it is and how much time has passed around events and it is panoramic as opposed to photographic), which is impressive given the way turnover and call-offs go.
Someone, however, did indeed call off on Tuesday, and I covered the close and opened Wednesday like usual, figured it wouldn't kill me to throw in a clopen at the beginning of my week and take a little overtime. Now the new schedule has come down the line and I do not get a day off till Wednesday, due to various requests for time off, so that's eight days in a row.
Frankly, I'm glad. I hated Monday, a day on which I accomplished little outside of recuperation, and wished I were at work. Now I have an unbroken stretch in front of me. I have asked, and now I shall receive. It is a blessing to have work for the hands, and paths to tread, so I am grateful.
*
Never before have I wondered if I could get away with simply coming in on my day off, punching the clock, and getting to work.
Kind of hoping for another call-off I can cover, either to throw a double in there or a ninth day, since I'm already approved for overtime.
*
I don't need a lot of money to live my life, but I am a gamer, and so when the numbers go up, I feel viscerally rewarded. Paychecks can be a sort of high score. That's why people ask each other "so, what's your game?"
People in my industry are pretty badly underpaid, so my effort-to-number ratio is pretty good. Like, a Wall Street shithead my age pulling in more than three hundred and fifty thousand points after taxes is playing Tetris on easy and getting his dick sucked for it and free cocaine into the bargain. I'm in the corner playing a pinball game that cuts or burns my hands or arms if I fuck up; if I lose, somebody gets sick, and if I play a perfect game, I might get fired with no notice because the pinball machine is fifty grand in the hole. The points don't exactly rack up, but I'm proud to punch my initials next to the score.
--JL
Wednesday, January 16, 2019
#98
Listened to a record some people who were my friends and more than my friends made before I knew them. They don't know me anymore, which is a situation I created, unfairly and for no good reason.
Sometimes, when you love a lot of people very much, you rip yourself out of all of their lives because you think deep down you are a mindless, devouring cancer. Not for the first time, you try to let yourself be destroyed. Not for the first time, you are spared, and forced to face your aching memories and peer uselessly at all the unknown dead ends laid out before you, groping in the dark.
*
When their second album is finally released I will listen to it, I will buy it the day that it comes out and I will listen to it. They wrote it and hammered it out while I did my best to feed and take care of them, and then I left them alone so they could lay down track.
That was almost two years ago. Nothing is the same.
Their voices will ring out, and I will listen, and I will remember, and I hope my ungrateful heart cracks down the middle.
*
Miss them. Hurts.
--JL
Sometimes, when you love a lot of people very much, you rip yourself out of all of their lives because you think deep down you are a mindless, devouring cancer. Not for the first time, you try to let yourself be destroyed. Not for the first time, you are spared, and forced to face your aching memories and peer uselessly at all the unknown dead ends laid out before you, groping in the dark.
*
When their second album is finally released I will listen to it, I will buy it the day that it comes out and I will listen to it. They wrote it and hammered it out while I did my best to feed and take care of them, and then I left them alone so they could lay down track.
That was almost two years ago. Nothing is the same.
Their voices will ring out, and I will listen, and I will remember, and I hope my ungrateful heart cracks down the middle.
*
Miss them. Hurts.
--JL
Tuesday, January 15, 2019
#97
Thought I was starting the new year off strong, but in truth was merely ending a shit year well. "Merely" might be a bit too rough; it's best to finish a lost race with your eyes up. Just that I may have been aggressively prescriptive and excessively optimistic thereby regarding prospects for a shining new life. Disagreeable.
*
If all your life adds up to mundanity and mistake so that all you can do is hold one door, stand on one line, say one correct thing, that's okay, but you gotta see it through. That's the tough part.
Another tough part is holding to what you know is right when no one would blame you for doing what only seems right.
*
You can't unknow your knowledge, and pretending that you can is a sin. I don't call a lot of things sins. Not a dogmatist by any means. I say fuck the Pope, rock premarital homosexual intercourse, listen to death metal and rap music real loud, throw up the horns and stick your pierced tongue out, do what you have to do in order to survive and thrive. God will look after you, and bring you home when you're ready.
But acting like you don't know what you do know absolutely is a sin.
--JL
*
If all your life adds up to mundanity and mistake so that all you can do is hold one door, stand on one line, say one correct thing, that's okay, but you gotta see it through. That's the tough part.
Another tough part is holding to what you know is right when no one would blame you for doing what only seems right.
*
You can't unknow your knowledge, and pretending that you can is a sin. I don't call a lot of things sins. Not a dogmatist by any means. I say fuck the Pope, rock premarital homosexual intercourse, listen to death metal and rap music real loud, throw up the horns and stick your pierced tongue out, do what you have to do in order to survive and thrive. God will look after you, and bring you home when you're ready.
But acting like you don't know what you do know absolutely is a sin.
--JL
Monday, January 14, 2019
#96
Long, tough week, folks--been working on other projects and running myself hard. Also, Pokémon don't immaculately train themselves. Short posts and monostitches for the near future.
*
the past is a monster with too many teeth
--JL
*
the past is a monster with too many teeth
--JL
Thursday, January 10, 2019
#95
Yeah, I smoke cigarettes again. If this surprises you, it indicates that you have not read this blog from the beginning (no pressure) and also that you have not read my poems, a blameless state easily ruined for the low, low price of seven dollars! For another seven you get a considerably more robust books of stories. I worked hard to make them worth the value for money. Maybe I don't think the book of poems are worth seven whole dollars, even though there are poets out there charging ten or even as much as fifteen bucks for fewer poems/pages, but I do think both books together are a fourteen-dollar value, so I say get both and think of the poems as a five-dollar book and the stories as a nine-dollar book. You will feel like you spent a smart dollar. That is my capitalistic wager.
Smoking, man. Fricking smoking.
*
Really I only started smoking cigarettes because I was paranoid about smelling like marijuana. And for my one misspent stupid ridiculous year of real college, I went to a campus where every single organism right down to the urinal scum smoked cigarettes. You could bum cigs off the squirrels. The place must have been unreal when people still smoked inside.
*
Life involves taking a ton of shit from people, people who you are trying to coexist with, people who you are even trying to help, or care for. One of the hardest realizations I have had, one I had as a child and have tried to wriggle out of ever since, is that there is no way out of taking this shit, no way out of eating it and praising the flavor. Not if you're honest with yourself about being honest, honest with yourself about the mathematics of life. Such a thing is so difficult a person may run from it for years and years and maybe even try and slowly drink themselves to death while smoking lots of cigarettes. It's a possibility.
Ultimately we are all guilty before one another, with no exceptions, and nothing can absolve us of our duty to forgive. No matter what is done to us, no matter how it hurts, we must try to not descend, not to hurt back; we must be the ones that break the cycle of blame and pain even if we are the most blamed, the ones in the most pain.
Or, harden your heart. You are free.
*
Being a person is exceptionally difficult. Trying to be a better person than you already are is such phenomenal fuckery that I am constantly amazed that anyone attempts it, let alone makes any headway.
--JL
Smoking, man. Fricking smoking.
*
Really I only started smoking cigarettes because I was paranoid about smelling like marijuana. And for my one misspent stupid ridiculous year of real college, I went to a campus where every single organism right down to the urinal scum smoked cigarettes. You could bum cigs off the squirrels. The place must have been unreal when people still smoked inside.
*
Life involves taking a ton of shit from people, people who you are trying to coexist with, people who you are even trying to help, or care for. One of the hardest realizations I have had, one I had as a child and have tried to wriggle out of ever since, is that there is no way out of taking this shit, no way out of eating it and praising the flavor. Not if you're honest with yourself about being honest, honest with yourself about the mathematics of life. Such a thing is so difficult a person may run from it for years and years and maybe even try and slowly drink themselves to death while smoking lots of cigarettes. It's a possibility.
Ultimately we are all guilty before one another, with no exceptions, and nothing can absolve us of our duty to forgive. No matter what is done to us, no matter how it hurts, we must try to not descend, not to hurt back; we must be the ones that break the cycle of blame and pain even if we are the most blamed, the ones in the most pain.
Or, harden your heart. You are free.
*
Being a person is exceptionally difficult. Trying to be a better person than you already are is such phenomenal fuckery that I am constantly amazed that anyone attempts it, let alone makes any headway.
--JL
Wednesday, January 9, 2019
#94
Pokémon! Nintendo released Silver, Gold, and Crystal versions for download on their e-lectronic shoppe, so I grabbed up Gold version and started tooling around just to hear the midi soundtrack (still the best of the lot, no contest) and look at the pixels and sprites. Before I knew what was happening I was rotating all my game cartridges in and out of my 2DS, furiously loading up the Bank to move things around, evolve certain Pokémon in one game and bring them into another, getting one game past the Elite Four as I start another in a different version as I put a few miles into the mid-game stretch of a third. I am a crazy person and this is not an okay thing.
Now, it is not that I just sat on my ass and did nothing else; also read some comics (Cigarette Girl, by Masahiko Matsumoto, and King City by Brandon Graham) and most of a psychology book (albeit a short one; The Art of Loving, by Erich Fromm), helped a friend clean and reorganize their room, bought some books*, walked around a bit. It's not good for me to have two whole days off, maybe. For it does remain fact that I feverishly played X, Y, Omega Ruby, and Moon versions for a non-trivial portion of the last three days. It could have been worse. I have more versions.
*
My very first Pokémon game was Blue Version. It was also my very first personally-owned game for my first personally-owned system, a yellow Game Boy Color. More about that another time. For now, it is enough to know that I'm a Blastoise Boy.
Second was Silver version. On my first playthrough of Silver, I logged more than two hundred and fourteen hours and got a couple of my boys up to level 90. This was, at the time and amongst people in my age group, an astonishing demonstration of attention span and focus. That I was able to do that and still read my usual steady diet of books, learn to play a musical instrument, and attend school is a mark of just how much free time children have, but also shows how good I am at logging massive hours while leading an apparently normal life. The Fire Emblem series are another good example of this manic tendency.
As Blue once called to me, so too did Sapphire version. So far, so consistent; always the sleeker version mascot, always the lower-temperature color. I chose Pearl over Diamond, White over Black, Y over X, and Moon over Sun. I will refer you to this chart, and you will see that every last one of my choices is on the right of the column! What a serendipitous occasion. Or does it mean something true and irrevocable about my deepest self?
Probably it does not, especially as given my own personal aesthetics and color value, the chart would have to be modified. Black and White cancel each other out, for starters. Y version was a marked departure for me aesthetically; I prefer X as a letter, and the bright metallic blues and greens of X are more my speed than the violent deep-pink-and-reds contrasted with black of Y version. But sometimes the mascot itself pushes harder than the color scheme; I prefer Yveltal to Xerneas. I do not like organisms styled along the infraorder Pecoria that go so far as to join Cervidae. I don't like cervids, basically. Never raised a Stantler, or a Deerling. Fuck deer, when you get right down to it. Don't like 'em. Don't trust 'em. Don't shoot 'em, personally, either; but I don't truck much with their kind. Some deer are cool.
Anyhow, with re-releases, I try to play the other end of things, except, notably, with HeartGold and SoulSilver; I love Silver version very deeply, and chose to ride with Lugia once more. I went with FireRed instead of LeafGreen and OmegaRuby instead of AlphaSapphire. And now I've gone back, sort of, for Gold version. Probably I'll download Red version, too. I lost my Pearl version, and I replaced it with a Diamond version.
Of course I have gotten the extra versions, for the most part, at the appropriate times; I have Yellow and Platinum, and have Played Crystal and Emerald though I do not own them--yet. Why do I say yet? Because all that "probably download" or replacing one with another was bullshit, and doesn't cut it, really. I shall be more honest about the situation.
You see, I loved Y so much I got X a couple years later, and I loved having them both so much that I got Moon and Sun at the same damn time--I only played Moon first. And you know what? I'm going to get myself AlphaSapphire, too. And get a Pearl version again, and the sequels to Black and White, and the Ultra versions of Sun and Moon. And every other version they've ever made, I will get them all, so help me Jesus, I will reclaim what I let go and I will forge ahead and never, ever--I will never--stop catching them all.
--JL
*
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin
Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby, by Charles Dickens
Danse Macabre and Just After Sunset, by Stephen King
The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
The Painted Bird By Jerzy Kozinski
The Maid by Yasutaka Tsutsui
Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and The Garden of Cyrus, by Sir Thomas Browne
Now, it is not that I just sat on my ass and did nothing else; also read some comics (Cigarette Girl, by Masahiko Matsumoto, and King City by Brandon Graham) and most of a psychology book (albeit a short one; The Art of Loving, by Erich Fromm), helped a friend clean and reorganize their room, bought some books*, walked around a bit. It's not good for me to have two whole days off, maybe. For it does remain fact that I feverishly played X, Y, Omega Ruby, and Moon versions for a non-trivial portion of the last three days. It could have been worse. I have more versions.
*
My very first Pokémon game was Blue Version. It was also my very first personally-owned game for my first personally-owned system, a yellow Game Boy Color. More about that another time. For now, it is enough to know that I'm a Blastoise Boy.
Second was Silver version. On my first playthrough of Silver, I logged more than two hundred and fourteen hours and got a couple of my boys up to level 90. This was, at the time and amongst people in my age group, an astonishing demonstration of attention span and focus. That I was able to do that and still read my usual steady diet of books, learn to play a musical instrument, and attend school is a mark of just how much free time children have, but also shows how good I am at logging massive hours while leading an apparently normal life. The Fire Emblem series are another good example of this manic tendency.
As Blue once called to me, so too did Sapphire version. So far, so consistent; always the sleeker version mascot, always the lower-temperature color. I chose Pearl over Diamond, White over Black, Y over X, and Moon over Sun. I will refer you to this chart, and you will see that every last one of my choices is on the right of the column! What a serendipitous occasion. Or does it mean something true and irrevocable about my deepest self?
Probably it does not, especially as given my own personal aesthetics and color value, the chart would have to be modified. Black and White cancel each other out, for starters. Y version was a marked departure for me aesthetically; I prefer X as a letter, and the bright metallic blues and greens of X are more my speed than the violent deep-pink-and-reds contrasted with black of Y version. But sometimes the mascot itself pushes harder than the color scheme; I prefer Yveltal to Xerneas. I do not like organisms styled along the infraorder Pecoria that go so far as to join Cervidae. I don't like cervids, basically. Never raised a Stantler, or a Deerling. Fuck deer, when you get right down to it. Don't like 'em. Don't trust 'em. Don't shoot 'em, personally, either; but I don't truck much with their kind. Some deer are cool.
Anyhow, with re-releases, I try to play the other end of things, except, notably, with HeartGold and SoulSilver; I love Silver version very deeply, and chose to ride with Lugia once more. I went with FireRed instead of LeafGreen and OmegaRuby instead of AlphaSapphire. And now I've gone back, sort of, for Gold version. Probably I'll download Red version, too. I lost my Pearl version, and I replaced it with a Diamond version.
Of course I have gotten the extra versions, for the most part, at the appropriate times; I have Yellow and Platinum, and have Played Crystal and Emerald though I do not own them--yet. Why do I say yet? Because all that "probably download" or replacing one with another was bullshit, and doesn't cut it, really. I shall be more honest about the situation.
You see, I loved Y so much I got X a couple years later, and I loved having them both so much that I got Moon and Sun at the same damn time--I only played Moon first. And you know what? I'm going to get myself AlphaSapphire, too. And get a Pearl version again, and the sequels to Black and White, and the Ultra versions of Sun and Moon. And every other version they've ever made, I will get them all, so help me Jesus, I will reclaim what I let go and I will forge ahead and never, ever--I will never--stop catching them all.
--JL
*
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin
Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby, by Charles Dickens
Danse Macabre and Just After Sunset, by Stephen King
The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
The Painted Bird By Jerzy Kozinski
The Maid by Yasutaka Tsutsui
Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and The Garden of Cyrus, by Sir Thomas Browne
Saturday, January 5, 2019
#93
Man, it was a beautiful day today. A lot of beautiful light fell out of a beautiful blue sky, and that light lit up a lot of beautiful things a lot of different and beautiful ways.
*
Forgot to mention! The first book I read this year, on New Year's Day, was Being There, by Jerzy Kosinski. It was hella dang good. It barely took an hour to read, too. Wanted to start the year with some concision.
*
Time for rest, people of the blog-reading community. Be kind to one another out there. Also, if you have a little extra money, buy my books! First plug of the new year! May this year render that link swollen with many more purchasing options.
--JL
*
Forgot to mention! The first book I read this year, on New Year's Day, was Being There, by Jerzy Kosinski. It was hella dang good. It barely took an hour to read, too. Wanted to start the year with some concision.
*
Time for rest, people of the blog-reading community. Be kind to one another out there. Also, if you have a little extra money, buy my books! First plug of the new year! May this year render that link swollen with many more purchasing options.
--JL
Friday, January 4, 2019
#92
Reading comics has been central to my life for as long as I can remember. I used to read the funnies to my grandpa on his porch when I was three years old. My mom taught me to read when I was two, and I was at my grandparent's a lot, learning table manners from my grandma and watching VHS tapes and reading the comics pages while my grandpa moved through the rest of the paper.
In order to grant myself turnkey access to comics every day, shortly after my family moved into the house where I am typing this, I took a job delivering the local paper around my neighborhood. I was eleven, and it was my first job. I held it for a few years, and then the newspaper gave up having a paperboy just for my neighborhood because a man with a car needed a recession job. Later the paper folded.
My second job was at this Chinese place on the way to downtown from my neighborhood. I went there with my friends and we had a nice time, and I left a big tip because I had just helped my uncle move a giant cooler and I had a little money. That went over real well with the server and something about my mood and the place and the day made me ask if they might be hiring, and she said she didn't know but to leave my number and if they were then her boss would call me. She did, and I started there with the understanding that I would be going off to college after the winter, spring, and summer.
After I dropped out of college I came back and worked there for four years except for once when I had a manic breakdown and left for a couple of months and another time I went to open a restaurant with my aunt and worked there for a few months before I had a physical altercation with my uncle, the giant cooler guy. I had also done some other jobs with him in the past: demolition on a house, a big sink installation, odd tasks and heavy hauls. He took a disagreement too far, but I should have just ducked his swing and dipped. Rather, I ducked his swing, picked him up, set him down hard on a table, then dragged him to the floor and put him in a chokehold till he tapped out. I should mention he is my uncle by marriage and no blood uncle of mine would ever have did me the way he did, and if they raised a hand to strike me I would probably just take the hit. I respect my blood uncles. I did not respect that dude. He nicked his scalp on a table-mounted can opener when I smacked him onto the table and he bled all over my shirt as he tried to punch my head, not really able to because I know my holds. Dude had no business taking a swing at me. Also they were overworking me and shorting my late paychecks.
Still, they were family, and I was wrong to fight him and never come back. I forgive them, but my aunt and I don't talk much, and she was once my favorite aunt, a special friend to me and my favorite cousin. I shan't be working with family again. Never spoke to the uncle again, don't know if he forgives me or not. Well, life is long. Perhaps one day there will be a peaceful reckoning.
Returning to the Chinese place as many times as I did is emblematic of a certain sentimentality I am prey to that has more or less destroyed my life several times over. There was no need to work there that long but that I could work hungover and read books behind the counter with my feet up when it was slow (this was not at all encouraged, you understand). It was not satisfying work; it was the menial, dragging, customer-and-telephone purgatory that is the lowest rungs of the service industry. Working for my aunt I learned how to work in a kitchen. I had to, fast, because she lied to me about what I would be doing; not merely "packing and register and some little part of the cooking and finishing the arepas and the empanadas", but line and dish and stock and janitor and register and packing and pantry and grill and fryer all at once. I even had to bake some shit. I also made drinks. I did everything you could imagine in that place. I got so I was getting good at it. Then that stupid, fundamentally moronic night with my uncle.
At the Chinese place the most involved thing I did was toss some soy sauce with chili oil mixed in over some cold noodles, ladle some peanut sauce over that, and throw sesame seeds on top. Folding crab rangoons and wontons, well, I never even got very good at that; I usually asked the girls to do it. I worked with mostly women. The other dudes were all drivers or cooks. I was the only male register monkey. I wiped tables and took orders and served people their food and bussed their shitty fucked up messes and smoked weed in the basement of the downtown location and a cigarette every hour, or two an hour if I thought I could get away with it. The last time I returned to that place, that level, watching the cooks do their thing, after actually working, having been the dude with the knife and the fire, was a considerable blow to my sense of self. That is when my drinking became very serious, instead of just serious.
Once my very serious drinking became a terrifying monster problem that ate my life and hurled me into an abyss, I really couldn't go back. When I began to drag myself up into some semblance of a new life, I started working at a national used car parts retailer. As a delivery driver. One step up the ladder.
Sentimentality. Maudlin and unrealistic and fixated on illusions and fleeting moments long past. That's the shit that kills me every time. I possess a more temperate form, which fuels my inveterate rereading and which I consider one of my great strengths, but if I don't watch it I can tie myself to anchors, several at a time, and throw myself into the ocean, and just try and hold my breath,
It doesn't work.
Working at that Chinese place defined my life in key ways. The stuff I learned, the people I worked with, the interactions I had with customers and bosses and partners and the food and the commuting, the different places I was at personally when I worked there, the stunts I pulled--I wouldn't take it back, you know, but it wasn't very healthy. It was a relationship based on valuing fleeting highs and allowance for misconduct and the indulgence of vice more than addressing grave structural problems, imbalances, and abuses, both ways, which mirrors a lot of other relationships in my life. I tend to stay. That's not always good. I tend to come back. That's not always good either. Sometimes it is good to break up and stay away, because the reasons you're staying sound beautiful in your head but they're fishhooks in your skin, the ones that drag you back thinking you were crazy to leave even though you had never before contemplated a more total suffering.
The very first shift I ever worked there was the very last day for one of the cooks. He'd worked his bit and he was going back to China to get back with his family and set them up with what he earned. We had a special dinner after close to celebrate him and see him off. It was the first time I had ever tasted jellyfish, and it was absolutely delicious. I was so happy to be there. I felt so warm and nourished by that food and by the laughter and the companionship of that night. Many times I thought of leaving, even years later, it was remembering that night that kept me going; the smell and taste of the broth, the shining faces.
Just ridiculous.
--JL
In order to grant myself turnkey access to comics every day, shortly after my family moved into the house where I am typing this, I took a job delivering the local paper around my neighborhood. I was eleven, and it was my first job. I held it for a few years, and then the newspaper gave up having a paperboy just for my neighborhood because a man with a car needed a recession job. Later the paper folded.
My second job was at this Chinese place on the way to downtown from my neighborhood. I went there with my friends and we had a nice time, and I left a big tip because I had just helped my uncle move a giant cooler and I had a little money. That went over real well with the server and something about my mood and the place and the day made me ask if they might be hiring, and she said she didn't know but to leave my number and if they were then her boss would call me. She did, and I started there with the understanding that I would be going off to college after the winter, spring, and summer.
After I dropped out of college I came back and worked there for four years except for once when I had a manic breakdown and left for a couple of months and another time I went to open a restaurant with my aunt and worked there for a few months before I had a physical altercation with my uncle, the giant cooler guy. I had also done some other jobs with him in the past: demolition on a house, a big sink installation, odd tasks and heavy hauls. He took a disagreement too far, but I should have just ducked his swing and dipped. Rather, I ducked his swing, picked him up, set him down hard on a table, then dragged him to the floor and put him in a chokehold till he tapped out. I should mention he is my uncle by marriage and no blood uncle of mine would ever have did me the way he did, and if they raised a hand to strike me I would probably just take the hit. I respect my blood uncles. I did not respect that dude. He nicked his scalp on a table-mounted can opener when I smacked him onto the table and he bled all over my shirt as he tried to punch my head, not really able to because I know my holds. Dude had no business taking a swing at me. Also they were overworking me and shorting my late paychecks.
Still, they were family, and I was wrong to fight him and never come back. I forgive them, but my aunt and I don't talk much, and she was once my favorite aunt, a special friend to me and my favorite cousin. I shan't be working with family again. Never spoke to the uncle again, don't know if he forgives me or not. Well, life is long. Perhaps one day there will be a peaceful reckoning.
Returning to the Chinese place as many times as I did is emblematic of a certain sentimentality I am prey to that has more or less destroyed my life several times over. There was no need to work there that long but that I could work hungover and read books behind the counter with my feet up when it was slow (this was not at all encouraged, you understand). It was not satisfying work; it was the menial, dragging, customer-and-telephone purgatory that is the lowest rungs of the service industry. Working for my aunt I learned how to work in a kitchen. I had to, fast, because she lied to me about what I would be doing; not merely "packing and register and some little part of the cooking and finishing the arepas and the empanadas", but line and dish and stock and janitor and register and packing and pantry and grill and fryer all at once. I even had to bake some shit. I also made drinks. I did everything you could imagine in that place. I got so I was getting good at it. Then that stupid, fundamentally moronic night with my uncle.
At the Chinese place the most involved thing I did was toss some soy sauce with chili oil mixed in over some cold noodles, ladle some peanut sauce over that, and throw sesame seeds on top. Folding crab rangoons and wontons, well, I never even got very good at that; I usually asked the girls to do it. I worked with mostly women. The other dudes were all drivers or cooks. I was the only male register monkey. I wiped tables and took orders and served people their food and bussed their shitty fucked up messes and smoked weed in the basement of the downtown location and a cigarette every hour, or two an hour if I thought I could get away with it. The last time I returned to that place, that level, watching the cooks do their thing, after actually working, having been the dude with the knife and the fire, was a considerable blow to my sense of self. That is when my drinking became very serious, instead of just serious.
Once my very serious drinking became a terrifying monster problem that ate my life and hurled me into an abyss, I really couldn't go back. When I began to drag myself up into some semblance of a new life, I started working at a national used car parts retailer. As a delivery driver. One step up the ladder.
Sentimentality. Maudlin and unrealistic and fixated on illusions and fleeting moments long past. That's the shit that kills me every time. I possess a more temperate form, which fuels my inveterate rereading and which I consider one of my great strengths, but if I don't watch it I can tie myself to anchors, several at a time, and throw myself into the ocean, and just try and hold my breath,
It doesn't work.
Working at that Chinese place defined my life in key ways. The stuff I learned, the people I worked with, the interactions I had with customers and bosses and partners and the food and the commuting, the different places I was at personally when I worked there, the stunts I pulled--I wouldn't take it back, you know, but it wasn't very healthy. It was a relationship based on valuing fleeting highs and allowance for misconduct and the indulgence of vice more than addressing grave structural problems, imbalances, and abuses, both ways, which mirrors a lot of other relationships in my life. I tend to stay. That's not always good. I tend to come back. That's not always good either. Sometimes it is good to break up and stay away, because the reasons you're staying sound beautiful in your head but they're fishhooks in your skin, the ones that drag you back thinking you were crazy to leave even though you had never before contemplated a more total suffering.
The very first shift I ever worked there was the very last day for one of the cooks. He'd worked his bit and he was going back to China to get back with his family and set them up with what he earned. We had a special dinner after close to celebrate him and see him off. It was the first time I had ever tasted jellyfish, and it was absolutely delicious. I was so happy to be there. I felt so warm and nourished by that food and by the laughter and the companionship of that night. Many times I thought of leaving, even years later, it was remembering that night that kept me going; the smell and taste of the broth, the shining faces.
Just ridiculous.
--JL
Thursday, January 3, 2019
#91
Walking along the railroad tracks I came upon the smashed, dismembered body of a deer. One does sometimes.
At first glance I thought it was a big coyote, dead on the tracks from poison or a fight. I thought so because of the size of the ear in relation to the body, which had its back to me and was laid on its side, but was fooled; the animal's lower half was fully torn away. As I drew closer I saw the shape of the ear was wrong, then as I took a quick look up the tracks I saw a crow perched on a big, dully glistening liver next to a hoofed forelimb, big thick torn tendons sticking out like twists of rawhide.
It was a cold morning; not frigid, but cold enough for there to be a rime all over the ground and sidewalks and tree trunks, cold enough to give grass that pale armor that crunches and whispers underfoot. In addition, it was one of those winter days that manages to be damp, with a very fine snow drifting invisibly, adding itself to the frozen slush puddles on the sidewalk, frosting leaves and metal rails, and melting into the fur of dead animals and freezing soft.
There was something nearly supernatural about the scene, and terribly comical. The deer could not have been more than two hours dead, but it was only half an hour or perhaps forty minutes after dawn, so the crows had only managed to put a cluster of holes into the liver like someone had taken a dull icepick to it, all on the widest curve of the right lobe. Otherwise, the flesh and strewn organs had steamed, unmolested in the dark, until the cold hardened them and began to put a dull transparent sheen over them. There was no odor save the tacky smell of bloody bone, which was not strong unless you leaned in close.
A wadded up, bizarrely folded chunk of flesh and skin and gristle lay a few feet behind the body, closer than the liver. I examined it for several minutes, walking away and coming back to refresh my perspective, and I still cannot say whether it was part of its snout of the meaty part of a hip joint. The snout is a strong contender, since it wasn't on his head. His tongue, sticking out between bloodied, strange flat teeth beneath was scraped along a rail slat as though in his final agony he had dragged it along its surface as to taste one last thing one last time, so hard he had somehow scraped away his nose.
This is nonsense, for it was evident that the animal died on impact or possibly even a split second before. Both his antlers were gone, the one that would have been facing up to the sky just a red hole with a jagged bit of white sticking out partway. His eyes, perfectly intact, had clouded and frosted over. The rear part of his body was torn away just before the paunch, viscera and carnage brutally honest about themselves but not messy, and could not be found, though I did find three legs. Not the fourth. His stumps stuck out sadly in front of him. The tendons sticking out of those were not like rawhide, not stiff: they lay limp like boiled, heavily sauced pasta.
The legs were scattered, but all within ten or fifteen feet of the body, all just the lower parts. It was curious how particularly dead the hooves looked. They, at any rate, should have looked no different, but the hooves looked deader than the eyes and the spilled guts and the ice forming in the fur.
Anyway the truly crazy parts about the whole thing and this human world we've built are these:
One, if someone had happened along, I would have had no way of proving conclusively that I hadn't chucked a grenade at the deer just to watch the guts fly, then hung around to watch my handiwork freeze into some kind of grisly sculpture. That's how thoroughly a train can mess up an organism. It looked like the deer had swallowed a bomb.
Two, a little ways down the track, I found a possum, sliced in half, exactly as fresh, clearly killed by the same train, practically at the same moment. These creatures died together, uncomprehending, unable to protect themselves.
Life is full of surprising chances.
--JL
At first glance I thought it was a big coyote, dead on the tracks from poison or a fight. I thought so because of the size of the ear in relation to the body, which had its back to me and was laid on its side, but was fooled; the animal's lower half was fully torn away. As I drew closer I saw the shape of the ear was wrong, then as I took a quick look up the tracks I saw a crow perched on a big, dully glistening liver next to a hoofed forelimb, big thick torn tendons sticking out like twists of rawhide.
It was a cold morning; not frigid, but cold enough for there to be a rime all over the ground and sidewalks and tree trunks, cold enough to give grass that pale armor that crunches and whispers underfoot. In addition, it was one of those winter days that manages to be damp, with a very fine snow drifting invisibly, adding itself to the frozen slush puddles on the sidewalk, frosting leaves and metal rails, and melting into the fur of dead animals and freezing soft.
There was something nearly supernatural about the scene, and terribly comical. The deer could not have been more than two hours dead, but it was only half an hour or perhaps forty minutes after dawn, so the crows had only managed to put a cluster of holes into the liver like someone had taken a dull icepick to it, all on the widest curve of the right lobe. Otherwise, the flesh and strewn organs had steamed, unmolested in the dark, until the cold hardened them and began to put a dull transparent sheen over them. There was no odor save the tacky smell of bloody bone, which was not strong unless you leaned in close.
A wadded up, bizarrely folded chunk of flesh and skin and gristle lay a few feet behind the body, closer than the liver. I examined it for several minutes, walking away and coming back to refresh my perspective, and I still cannot say whether it was part of its snout of the meaty part of a hip joint. The snout is a strong contender, since it wasn't on his head. His tongue, sticking out between bloodied, strange flat teeth beneath was scraped along a rail slat as though in his final agony he had dragged it along its surface as to taste one last thing one last time, so hard he had somehow scraped away his nose.
This is nonsense, for it was evident that the animal died on impact or possibly even a split second before. Both his antlers were gone, the one that would have been facing up to the sky just a red hole with a jagged bit of white sticking out partway. His eyes, perfectly intact, had clouded and frosted over. The rear part of his body was torn away just before the paunch, viscera and carnage brutally honest about themselves but not messy, and could not be found, though I did find three legs. Not the fourth. His stumps stuck out sadly in front of him. The tendons sticking out of those were not like rawhide, not stiff: they lay limp like boiled, heavily sauced pasta.
The legs were scattered, but all within ten or fifteen feet of the body, all just the lower parts. It was curious how particularly dead the hooves looked. They, at any rate, should have looked no different, but the hooves looked deader than the eyes and the spilled guts and the ice forming in the fur.
Anyway the truly crazy parts about the whole thing and this human world we've built are these:
One, if someone had happened along, I would have had no way of proving conclusively that I hadn't chucked a grenade at the deer just to watch the guts fly, then hung around to watch my handiwork freeze into some kind of grisly sculpture. That's how thoroughly a train can mess up an organism. It looked like the deer had swallowed a bomb.
Two, a little ways down the track, I found a possum, sliced in half, exactly as fresh, clearly killed by the same train, practically at the same moment. These creatures died together, uncomprehending, unable to protect themselves.
Life is full of surprising chances.
--JL
Wednesday, January 2, 2019
#90
Wooooo boy, what a day! Got up at four, and at five sharp I set myself to a walkabout and but for two ten-minute rests, a short while up a tree, and fifteen minutes warming up with a cup of soup, I was constantly stepping. One step after another, and I did not cross my home threshold till some time after the clock rang three of the evening. Pretty great first walk of the new year, I give it an A plus. I would hazard that I made around thirty miles.
*
You'd think I'd have more than that. I generated a lot of ideas, yes, but I'm a little tired--not beat, not like I am after the usual walks on top a shift dealio, and I do work tomorrow. I feel like reading. I'm gonna read. What have I read since I last talked about books? A bunch of Shigeru Mizuki's Gege No Kitaro stories, this graphic novel by this dude LRNZ called Golem, two books of Roald Dahl's short stories (this "best of" dealio Hyperion put out which took from a bunch of his other collections and also my childhood friend The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More), Lightsabers, by Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta, part of the Young Jedi Knights Series (I am working hard on rebuilding my collection of these books, as well as my collection of Animorphs, the top shareholders in Stuff I Regret Giving To Charity, I Mean Not Really But, Hell, Kind Of Sometimes LLC.),
Just started reading The Dark Is Rising Sequence, by Susan Cooper. I am three-quarters done with the first one; mad respect for the game so far. I especially and extremely love the attention to detail, thoroughness, and I instinctively honor a person who knows how not to rush a good story or push the characters in it out of themselves in order to rudely advance plot. This is a too-common weakness, but it is absent here, as are basically all the common weaknesses.
I have known about and been meaning to read and not reading these books for a full seventeen years now. The way some things keep slipping away from one is nothing short of unconscionable.
*
You may have noticed that aside from a "serious" novel or three here and there I've been reading what some might call middling fare, heavy on the Young Adult. To this I can only say that YA is and has most often been where the muhfuckin fire be at, so ditch, bitch.
Also that I have been recalibrating from some serious life shifts and stuff like that is very grounding and nourishing, and finally that serious readers elevate that upon which they cast their eyes as much as the reverse; I read what some might call pap, or pulp, or pornography, or hack-work, and I use these terms for certain kinds of writing myself--but much more sparingly than most.
Truth is a lot of books are very good, more than a million tons of them, even though people like to act like only a few every year are and probably about fifty all through history are really great or whatever.
No. No. This is not a good way to think. There is more great writing than you will be able to read in your lifetime. Most of it, the vast majority of it, people will try to make you feel stupid for enjoying, or act smarter than you because they have memorized hardcore lessons about five or six great books and think that means they don't need to read anymore.
They can't change how great it is, though. They do not have that power.
Anyhow, I do read like, Faulkner or whatever, too. I know about Hamlet's whole deal and blah-de-blah-de-bloo-bah.
Just not hitting that grade of stuff a lot right now.
--JL
*
You'd think I'd have more than that. I generated a lot of ideas, yes, but I'm a little tired--not beat, not like I am after the usual walks on top a shift dealio, and I do work tomorrow. I feel like reading. I'm gonna read. What have I read since I last talked about books? A bunch of Shigeru Mizuki's Gege No Kitaro stories, this graphic novel by this dude LRNZ called Golem, two books of Roald Dahl's short stories (this "best of" dealio Hyperion put out which took from a bunch of his other collections and also my childhood friend The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More), Lightsabers, by Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta, part of the Young Jedi Knights Series (I am working hard on rebuilding my collection of these books, as well as my collection of Animorphs, the top shareholders in Stuff I Regret Giving To Charity, I Mean Not Really But, Hell, Kind Of Sometimes LLC.),
Just started reading The Dark Is Rising Sequence, by Susan Cooper. I am three-quarters done with the first one; mad respect for the game so far. I especially and extremely love the attention to detail, thoroughness, and I instinctively honor a person who knows how not to rush a good story or push the characters in it out of themselves in order to rudely advance plot. This is a too-common weakness, but it is absent here, as are basically all the common weaknesses.
I have known about and been meaning to read and not reading these books for a full seventeen years now. The way some things keep slipping away from one is nothing short of unconscionable.
*
You may have noticed that aside from a "serious" novel or three here and there I've been reading what some might call middling fare, heavy on the Young Adult. To this I can only say that YA is and has most often been where the muhfuckin fire be at, so ditch, bitch.
Also that I have been recalibrating from some serious life shifts and stuff like that is very grounding and nourishing, and finally that serious readers elevate that upon which they cast their eyes as much as the reverse; I read what some might call pap, or pulp, or pornography, or hack-work, and I use these terms for certain kinds of writing myself--but much more sparingly than most.
Truth is a lot of books are very good, more than a million tons of them, even though people like to act like only a few every year are and probably about fifty all through history are really great or whatever.
No. No. This is not a good way to think. There is more great writing than you will be able to read in your lifetime. Most of it, the vast majority of it, people will try to make you feel stupid for enjoying, or act smarter than you because they have memorized hardcore lessons about five or six great books and think that means they don't need to read anymore.
They can't change how great it is, though. They do not have that power.
Anyhow, I do read like, Faulkner or whatever, too. I know about Hamlet's whole deal and blah-de-blah-de-bloo-bah.
Just not hitting that grade of stuff a lot right now.
--JL
Tuesday, January 1, 2019
#89
Well, one more ellipsis round our mother star, people. Pat yourselves on the back.
Of course, this is a daily thing; every day the one-year anniversary of the last time we made it one, or ten, or two hundred and forty days of hurling nonstop through the aether, at the mercy of poorly-understood forces for a twenty-four hour period. Still. Stayed up till midnight and drank a champagne flute full of lime-flavored sparkling water, in thanks for three hundred and sixty-five days without Ragnarok, Cthulu, or instant and unexplained total oblivion, and may God grant us three hundred and sixty-five more before I have to stay up till midnight to strengthen a ward for another year.
Saw a video this morning of a huge firework landing on a penthouse fireworks party, taken from a nearby, taller building. The internet allows for me the very worst of myself.
*
However, it also lets me look at stuff like this for as long as I need to. For a little while. Every age has its private pleasures and personal agonies, which people past and future could only ever guess at, misremember, or never think about or guess at. The internet has already changed so much, I can't guarantee anything. Someday the internet might be a place where you can't look at a single picture for free, or type whatever comes into your brain into a text field. Someday you might do your typing with your neurons alone. Someday the internet will no longer be a world wide web but you will have to jack into area-governed, locally-dominated Nodes, "tiny" local hyperserver clusters running megaclouds which guard their own precious sets closely, but allow nomadic traffic in order to harvest fresh data and build up viral immunizations.
Indeed, I think it probable that one day, most of us will be no more than nomadic traffic; wandering dollars, rootless spirits. The very few, genetically-enhanced neo-persons in gilded cages of wealth and permanence so powerful and entrenched they are unto a glittering pantheon of anti-angels, immortal and ultramaterial, the whole wide world an unimportant, barely diverting game depending on their incomprehensible whims.
*
Things to enjoy while we have them: Earth, air, water, and trees. A blue sky we can look at and stand under with a clean wind in our hair. Looking with our eyes into other people's eyes and seeing recognition, feeling recognition. Words spoken gently with a voice. The feel of a friendly animal's fur, feathers, chitin, scales, slime layer, or skin under our hands. Walking in the woods. Public art, freely available art, access to all manner of media with unprecedented ease and in unprecedented volume for an unprecedented many. Laughing at jokes. Eating real food, grown in soil, prepared by hand. Life-giving rain, clouds, and moisture. Biodiversity. The present lack of total war, multiplicity of wars notwithstanding. The present lack of catastrophic plagues. Money in your pocket and a semblance of freedom, if you're real lucky. A chance to get some, if you're not so much.
Finally, there's always worse luck out there.
*
Cool. Let's have an interesting year. Let's see what we can make of it.
--JL
Of course, this is a daily thing; every day the one-year anniversary of the last time we made it one, or ten, or two hundred and forty days of hurling nonstop through the aether, at the mercy of poorly-understood forces for a twenty-four hour period. Still. Stayed up till midnight and drank a champagne flute full of lime-flavored sparkling water, in thanks for three hundred and sixty-five days without Ragnarok, Cthulu, or instant and unexplained total oblivion, and may God grant us three hundred and sixty-five more before I have to stay up till midnight to strengthen a ward for another year.
Saw a video this morning of a huge firework landing on a penthouse fireworks party, taken from a nearby, taller building. The internet allows for me the very worst of myself.
*
However, it also lets me look at stuff like this for as long as I need to. For a little while. Every age has its private pleasures and personal agonies, which people past and future could only ever guess at, misremember, or never think about or guess at. The internet has already changed so much, I can't guarantee anything. Someday the internet might be a place where you can't look at a single picture for free, or type whatever comes into your brain into a text field. Someday you might do your typing with your neurons alone. Someday the internet will no longer be a world wide web but you will have to jack into area-governed, locally-dominated Nodes, "tiny" local hyperserver clusters running megaclouds which guard their own precious sets closely, but allow nomadic traffic in order to harvest fresh data and build up viral immunizations.
Indeed, I think it probable that one day, most of us will be no more than nomadic traffic; wandering dollars, rootless spirits. The very few, genetically-enhanced neo-persons in gilded cages of wealth and permanence so powerful and entrenched they are unto a glittering pantheon of anti-angels, immortal and ultramaterial, the whole wide world an unimportant, barely diverting game depending on their incomprehensible whims.
*
Things to enjoy while we have them: Earth, air, water, and trees. A blue sky we can look at and stand under with a clean wind in our hair. Looking with our eyes into other people's eyes and seeing recognition, feeling recognition. Words spoken gently with a voice. The feel of a friendly animal's fur, feathers, chitin, scales, slime layer, or skin under our hands. Walking in the woods. Public art, freely available art, access to all manner of media with unprecedented ease and in unprecedented volume for an unprecedented many. Laughing at jokes. Eating real food, grown in soil, prepared by hand. Life-giving rain, clouds, and moisture. Biodiversity. The present lack of total war, multiplicity of wars notwithstanding. The present lack of catastrophic plagues. Money in your pocket and a semblance of freedom, if you're real lucky. A chance to get some, if you're not so much.
Finally, there's always worse luck out there.
*
Cool. Let's have an interesting year. Let's see what we can make of it.
--JL
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