#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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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