Just lied to the family dog; told him I'd go sit near him and came upstairs to write this instead.
*
Alright. All the softcover fiction, all the poetry, my collection of Classical texts all are on shelves or stacked on top of one of three bookshelves, and the fourth shelf is full of hardcovers with a bunch of oversize reference, art books, and comics stacked on that. One of the shelves has my favorite softcover nonfiction in it, too. The rest of my hardbacks are in two tall stacks on one of the end tables and the rest of my softcover nonfiction is in one huge three-tier stack against a wall. Futon booksnake is still in place, as are the stacks on the other end table, but a couple more traditional bookcases and a some wall-mounted dealios and all my books should be on a shelf.
The organization is not what it once was, when I owned nine bookcases and about forty percent more of the total books I own now. The library used to be a testament to the inside of my brain and how I think of things, an arrangement whose power and breadth was such that it required its own room and I felt comfortable showing it off to anyone.
Now they all live in my room and I don't want anyone in here ever again for any reason. Doing this has helped me remember that a few of my favorite and most important books are in the hands of people I do not wish to speak to and the hands of people who have stopped speaking to me for no stated reason.
Too many books. Still too many. It is a huge mistake to live how I have lived. If you can make yourself stop reading, do it. I am a horrible monster and every book makes me worse.
*
Also I cleaned and organized my desk, which more in the middle of the floor and turned more towards the western wall.
*
Guess I'll go sit on the couch while the dog lays very still on his belly with his jaws clamped around a wadded-up blanket.
--JL
Thursday, February 28, 2019
Tuesday, February 26, 2019
#124
Worked a double yesterday! Had a pretty good shift. There are always a few good seconds in even the grimmest of shifts at the worst of workplaces, in my experience--and after eleven-plus years of swapping stories and accruing the misery that is the right to tell them, I can say I've worked some dark, truly regrettable shifts in my time. My spirits were up pretty much the whole time yesterday, which is really an incredible gift when you think about it. Lucky stuff.
*
Having bookshelves again has disrupted my life considerably. My room is in somewhat of a transition phase. To bring about form, to trend towards order and organization and hold a pattern, the universe must undergo changes. Changes are chaotic and disruptive. Patterns are never perfect in their repetition. Forms, never identical, interact. This is the paradox that describes being and time.
*
Well, I boiled it down a lot.
*
My room is a mess. Difficult to concentrate.
*
Perspective truly is the only thing that has any chance of saving your life.
Might as well throw that into the pool, while I'm casually saying whatever.
*
Okay, peace. I want to play some video games before I go to work, and also read, and have some nutrition. Again, peace. Peace out.
--JL
*
Having bookshelves again has disrupted my life considerably. My room is in somewhat of a transition phase. To bring about form, to trend towards order and organization and hold a pattern, the universe must undergo changes. Changes are chaotic and disruptive. Patterns are never perfect in their repetition. Forms, never identical, interact. This is the paradox that describes being and time.
*
Well, I boiled it down a lot.
*
My room is a mess. Difficult to concentrate.
*
Perspective truly is the only thing that has any chance of saving your life.
Might as well throw that into the pool, while I'm casually saying whatever.
*
Okay, peace. I want to play some video games before I go to work, and also read, and have some nutrition. Again, peace. Peace out.
--JL
Saturday, February 23, 2019
#123
Man, today was shitty. It was a dirty butt of a day. Sucked.
So I tagged along with my mom and at the Ikea where she needed to get some curtain runners I got myself four bookshelves. Just put one together. Then, after I put some of my books in it, I'm going to put together another, and put some of my books in it. Then I'll go to sleep.
*
Ah, well. The hundred and twenty-third post, what should by all rights be a joyous occasion and a post with at least a touch of flair, marred by a fucked-up shift and some of the most boring news there is. I mean, for me, buying four bookshelves is exactly the counterweight to a bad shift, a mighty spell of order over chaos, and well-being over clawing at my own head under a single, flickering light bulb dangling from a naked wire.
Most people don't get excited about shelving their books, though. This is their own grave and pitiable deficiency. Hey, at least I'm going to sleep later! This is something almost everyone can relate to, very lowest common denominator.
Sleeping! The people's truest form of entertainment.
--JL
So I tagged along with my mom and at the Ikea where she needed to get some curtain runners I got myself four bookshelves. Just put one together. Then, after I put some of my books in it, I'm going to put together another, and put some of my books in it. Then I'll go to sleep.
*
Ah, well. The hundred and twenty-third post, what should by all rights be a joyous occasion and a post with at least a touch of flair, marred by a fucked-up shift and some of the most boring news there is. I mean, for me, buying four bookshelves is exactly the counterweight to a bad shift, a mighty spell of order over chaos, and well-being over clawing at my own head under a single, flickering light bulb dangling from a naked wire.
Most people don't get excited about shelving their books, though. This is their own grave and pitiable deficiency. Hey, at least I'm going to sleep later! This is something almost everyone can relate to, very lowest common denominator.
Sleeping! The people's truest form of entertainment.
--JL
Friday, February 22, 2019
#122
A would-be cult leader is trying to get his shit rolling downhill by erecting Alt-Buddhism. His subreddit has been up for maybe two days and already he is deleting all criticism of his "ideas" as spam.
Said "ideas" are...well, perhaps any oxygen I could give them wouldn't suit them. He's just trying to find people he can bully, but it is much more likely that if he miraculously scraped any success off the hull of this thing, someone bigger and meaner and smarter than him would steal it.
The whole thing is very funny, and it makes me very sad. Self-identifying "American Conservative Males" are truly lost. Poor, damned, weak-chinned orphans. Is it any wonder lighter, faster predators stole their food supply*? And now, we watch them thrash desperately in rudderless conniptions on the dusty floor, tears streaming from eyes they insist have always been and will ever be dry and clear, clawing at the very suggestions of straws in order to maintain a shadow of their sense of self.
Still in better shape than neoliberals and baby socialists, whose star only seems to be waxing from their own perspective, which has become so frighteningly narrow, ahistorical, and confused; it will be interesting to see their faces should they at last grasp hold only to find it is of the "Plague" variety. Of stars.
Plague Stars radiate not merely photons, but seething, virulent photonic illness. This light...kills.
Metaphorically and literally.
Like, with guillotines. Also, firing squads.
*
I need to not be thinking about politics. Anything else will do, anything at all. I was doing so well for a while, and I was happy. But not thinking at least in reaction to the mounting barrage of "election" propaganda is like trying to stay dry while swimming in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the middle part, a mile and a half down into the airless dark.
People tend to talk about these things, how much money an individual was able to part from fools how quickly, whose team should beat whose and who should be star player (this is increasingly how news anchors and "reporters" talk about politics), what it is all supposed to mean (that the speaker is right and if you disagree you are probably a Nazi and definitely an uninformed moron). People feel very free, perhaps even act instinctively, when they insert this nonsense into previously productive and healthy conversations.
In addition the television news networks, which have been in constant election cycle since 1984, have gotten more febrile about their own political involvement over the past twenty years, and exponentially for the past three (hard data supports this). Nightmare scenario.
Twhitteric and Rhedditric don't exactly help matters, not to mention the nonsense generated by even viler cesspools.
Also I am reading a lot of history and it is as always a strong reminder of what kind of animal the human being is (political**). Shit is how it is, but I don't have to like how it manifests. Noise makes it hard to think.
--JL
*my favorites among these ranks are traditional monarchists. There is something poetic about a young man who wants a king over him, literally hunched over him, king cock shoved deep into subject asshole, in this, the twenty-first century. The best part is that this cretinous little crab is still in better rhetorical shape and wields more power and influence in discourse than the sorts of men who once reaped the benefits of WASP patriarchy, and also, regular dudes. A dude who would wipe Louis XIV's shitty butt with silk and brag about it to his friends is cooler in this day and age than a dude who would take what autonomy he could under what democracy is capable of. Fucking beautiful.
**and confused. See above.
Said "ideas" are...well, perhaps any oxygen I could give them wouldn't suit them. He's just trying to find people he can bully, but it is much more likely that if he miraculously scraped any success off the hull of this thing, someone bigger and meaner and smarter than him would steal it.
The whole thing is very funny, and it makes me very sad. Self-identifying "American Conservative Males" are truly lost. Poor, damned, weak-chinned orphans. Is it any wonder lighter, faster predators stole their food supply*? And now, we watch them thrash desperately in rudderless conniptions on the dusty floor, tears streaming from eyes they insist have always been and will ever be dry and clear, clawing at the very suggestions of straws in order to maintain a shadow of their sense of self.
Still in better shape than neoliberals and baby socialists, whose star only seems to be waxing from their own perspective, which has become so frighteningly narrow, ahistorical, and confused; it will be interesting to see their faces should they at last grasp hold only to find it is of the "Plague" variety. Of stars.
Plague Stars radiate not merely photons, but seething, virulent photonic illness. This light...kills.
Metaphorically and literally.
Like, with guillotines. Also, firing squads.
*
I need to not be thinking about politics. Anything else will do, anything at all. I was doing so well for a while, and I was happy. But not thinking at least in reaction to the mounting barrage of "election" propaganda is like trying to stay dry while swimming in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the middle part, a mile and a half down into the airless dark.
People tend to talk about these things, how much money an individual was able to part from fools how quickly, whose team should beat whose and who should be star player (this is increasingly how news anchors and "reporters" talk about politics), what it is all supposed to mean (that the speaker is right and if you disagree you are probably a Nazi and definitely an uninformed moron). People feel very free, perhaps even act instinctively, when they insert this nonsense into previously productive and healthy conversations.
In addition the television news networks, which have been in constant election cycle since 1984, have gotten more febrile about their own political involvement over the past twenty years, and exponentially for the past three (hard data supports this). Nightmare scenario.
Twhitteric and Rhedditric don't exactly help matters, not to mention the nonsense generated by even viler cesspools.
Also I am reading a lot of history and it is as always a strong reminder of what kind of animal the human being is (political**). Shit is how it is, but I don't have to like how it manifests. Noise makes it hard to think.
--JL
*my favorites among these ranks are traditional monarchists. There is something poetic about a young man who wants a king over him, literally hunched over him, king cock shoved deep into subject asshole, in this, the twenty-first century. The best part is that this cretinous little crab is still in better rhetorical shape and wields more power and influence in discourse than the sorts of men who once reaped the benefits of WASP patriarchy, and also, regular dudes. A dude who would wipe Louis XIV's shitty butt with silk and brag about it to his friends is cooler in this day and age than a dude who would take what autonomy he could under what democracy is capable of. Fucking beautiful.
**and confused. See above.
Thursday, February 21, 2019
#121
Just purchased a copy of John K. Fairbank's China: A New History, among other things (more books*, couple toothbrushes, a sandwich and a couple pints of cold antipasti from the deli) and looked the dude up after I got home.
First, I ate a sandwich.
Then I found out this dude finished the manuscript for his book in the summer, delivered the final copy to his published on September 14 and when he got home his heart flexed goodbye and the dude died right there. Also he took a microphone away from Howard Zinn once which is hilarious. I liked Zinn's People's History of The United States and that Zinn's Comic History of American Empire, but I got my differences with the dude for sure and would totally have wrestled the mic out his hand at the drop of a hat. Now I am halfway through the wikipedia article on the American Historical Association.
Bearing in mind that it is impossible to fully disentangle the two, I don't like the academy influencing politics and I don't like politicians going anywhere near the academy, and that includes communists and the humanities.
It may be that individual academics are correct in believing that their specialized knowledge confers upon them a special clarity in perceiving and judging government policy at every level, and that their political views justify sophistry; that every agenda in the academy is abhorrent except for the one whose ideology they happen to espouse. I think sophistry is sophistry no matter how virtuous you think your opinions are or who agrees with you.
Of course it bears remembering that what the fuck do I know. At the end of every workday, I wipe a disinfected rag over a bunch of stainless steel and I throw a garbage bag from one garbage can into a bigger garbage can. Then I walk home. I don't have nearly the sufficient confidence in how much I know to act like I deserve for it to earn me anything.
Anyway if a dude gets accused of being a communist and of being an imperialist, I'm probably going to at least find his book interesting. I read on both sides of every aisle; that's how libraries are designed.
*
One hundred and twenty-one is a pretty good number. Not one of the coolest, but pretty cool.
--JL
*from the library I got this book on Murakami Takashi and this book on Picasso and Surrealism. From the used bookstore I got a book on the war between the Zulu Nation and Victorian Britain, a book on European culture from 1500 to the present that is thicker than this complete history of Europe I'm reading right now, a Star Wars book by Karen Traviss, a couple of Philip K. Dick books, and the omnibus print edition of the unbelievably good and important webcomic Digger, by Ursula Vernon, which I started reading online as it was starting out, when I was just thirteen years old.
First, I ate a sandwich.
Then I found out this dude finished the manuscript for his book in the summer, delivered the final copy to his published on September 14 and when he got home his heart flexed goodbye and the dude died right there. Also he took a microphone away from Howard Zinn once which is hilarious. I liked Zinn's People's History of The United States and that Zinn's Comic History of American Empire, but I got my differences with the dude for sure and would totally have wrestled the mic out his hand at the drop of a hat. Now I am halfway through the wikipedia article on the American Historical Association.
Bearing in mind that it is impossible to fully disentangle the two, I don't like the academy influencing politics and I don't like politicians going anywhere near the academy, and that includes communists and the humanities.
It may be that individual academics are correct in believing that their specialized knowledge confers upon them a special clarity in perceiving and judging government policy at every level, and that their political views justify sophistry; that every agenda in the academy is abhorrent except for the one whose ideology they happen to espouse. I think sophistry is sophistry no matter how virtuous you think your opinions are or who agrees with you.
Of course it bears remembering that what the fuck do I know. At the end of every workday, I wipe a disinfected rag over a bunch of stainless steel and I throw a garbage bag from one garbage can into a bigger garbage can. Then I walk home. I don't have nearly the sufficient confidence in how much I know to act like I deserve for it to earn me anything.
Anyway if a dude gets accused of being a communist and of being an imperialist, I'm probably going to at least find his book interesting. I read on both sides of every aisle; that's how libraries are designed.
*
One hundred and twenty-one is a pretty good number. Not one of the coolest, but pretty cool.
--JL
*from the library I got this book on Murakami Takashi and this book on Picasso and Surrealism. From the used bookstore I got a book on the war between the Zulu Nation and Victorian Britain, a book on European culture from 1500 to the present that is thicker than this complete history of Europe I'm reading right now, a Star Wars book by Karen Traviss, a couple of Philip K. Dick books, and the omnibus print edition of the unbelievably good and important webcomic Digger, by Ursula Vernon, which I started reading online as it was starting out, when I was just thirteen years old.
Wednesday, February 20, 2019
#120
Don't like conspiracy theories, personally. The minuscule sliver of them that are perfectly true and are only termed conspiracy theories because of CIA disinformation campaigns are simply not worth the rest of them, some of them also CIA disinformation. I hope it's not too crazy to make that statement; nothing I have just said is not on the public record.
*
In particular, and as always, I am thinking of and still absolutely amazed that the History Channel, which I could easily and accurately call the W.R. Hearst Legacy Channel, broadcasts the show Ancient Aliens to the viewing public. I hope Umberto Eco passed without having seen it. It is everything he writes about in his essay on Ur-Fascism, everything he talks about when he discusses critical historical misinterpretation and dangerous textual telephone in his book Serendipities, it is just plain conspiracy theory and the undermining of rational thought and empirical thinking and inductive reasoning.
If you want to know what the show Ancient Aliens is actually about, what its purpose is, and why the people who make it and the trolls that feature prominently are just irresponsible at best, get a load of this shit. Slip into the rabbit hole a ways. Learn about "Awareness" and the true story of our solar system. You're either the kind of person who will fall for it and come to believe that I am the insane one--possibly even not human--for not believing in it, or you'll understand why I'm pissed.
*
I have hazel eyes, by the way, and possess vivid memories of my childhood dreams, many of which involved being strapped to a vertical surface by shadowy figures and being pierced by a shifting but always circular pattern of individual lights like floating crystals, so bright they rayed and spangled wildly in the vision. The feeling was one of total panic and of being penetrated and rearranged internally.
So you know, this has particular significance, according to the above conspiracy theory. Makes me special. Singled out.
Still think all of that is bullshit. Come on, people. Get with a program that is called the delusion of being outside a delusion. Take a step back. Then take one more.
*
Not a very productive post. Hey, I hate the fucking teevee and the insufferable lunatic demagogues it so clearly empowers and rewards, everybody! I hate to death its infinitely hungry, ever-regurgitating, white-glowing maw!
Of course, I am a person who has watched a lot of cartoons and PBS and HBO which is, of course, still television. I love the teevee as much as the next guy but FUCK.
Similar to how I'm pretty much an internet person, shaped by its forces and disdainful of misunderstandings of what I believe it represents, but am absolutely disgusted by everything about the internet, loathe it and belittle it at every opportunity.
Similar to how I'm pretty much an internet person, shaped by its forces and disdainful of misunderstandings of what I believe it represents, but am absolutely disgusted by everything about the internet, loathe it and belittle it at every opportunity.
Now back to reading this "mainstream history" book I am enjoying, even though it is clearly written specifically to keep me in the dark about how the Earth is actually hollow and full of things that want to drink my blood and steal my hormones.
--JL
Tuesday, February 19, 2019
#119
One hundred and nineteen is a cool number. I don't have a lot of feelings about nineteen itself, but I like when eleven is smashed into anything anytime it happens. Also, one plus one plus nine is eleven.
*
Some facts are inherently pleasurable. Pythagorean facts, little truths so elegant as to invoke worship. As some historically significant physicists and mathematicians have put it, that pleasure in finding things out and grasping the connections is the pleasure of discerning the mind of God; one of the goads of the human being, the ecstasy of spirituality, this action the universe takes in coming to know itself. Uncovering the Secrets of the Old One, as Stuart A. Kauffman put it.
*
Continuing from yesterday, one cannot deny the absolute truth of certain labels. "Identities". Roles we have no choice but to play, words we have no choice but to say.
Freedom, by the way, is in no way compromised by these things that our agency cannot shift. One is not unfree merely because one cannot sprout wings and fly into the sky, for example. And it may be that we shall generate descendants, whether "artificial" or analog, who are able to do just that, not that it matters. At any rate, fixed conditions do not abrogate total freedom. I'll elaborate on that stance some other time; I have a different pointless point today.
*
That I am a writer, that I am a man of some kind, that I am Catholic, that I am an American citizen, that I am an immigrant, that I am an English speaker and a Spanish speaker, that I posses a genetic map which to some worldviews renders me a "mongrel of the worst nightmare variety"*, that I got some mental health and activity quirks, that I am able-bodied and sighted and hearing, that I am a worker, all of these are facts I cannot deny and act as lenses through which I may be viewed and through which I have no choice but to view the world, unless I engage in acts of massive and useless self-denial.
Yeah, they're part of my identity, everyone has them. But a gem isn't its facets; facets are cut into gems by humans, just as identities are etched into you by the world. A gem, just as a human being, is in its material, its components, the arrangement of its atoms, its hardness, the colors at its heart.
Identity is the most outside part, the quickest and least descriptive shorthand. I try to dispense with it insofar as it is possible, but it is undeniable that the outside, being what is in the most constant with the world, will affect how the center holds and looks even to itself, how it is able to signify and codify according to the world. The race thing, my god! An emerald is green and a sapphire is blue and a ruby is red. I got news for you: they are the same stone. But they're not! But they are.
What is meant when it is said that we are made in God's own image is not that we are monkeys that stand upright, which really is a very fundamentally stupid fucking read. To imagine that God put the asshole in just because "he" has one too is simply concussed.
We are God because God is the paradox. God is the universe unfolding and watching the universe unfold from the lowest to the highest, from the incomprehensible micro to beyond the Void. Our atoms are a part of that unfolding, our cells, our tissues, our bodies and spirits and the ideas we generate and the things that we make, from the greatest to the least.
Alpha and Omega. One over infinity and infinity over one.
*
So when I admit to these labels, it essential to qualify that I see these things in my own way and have drawn my own conclusions, because I make a conscious efforts to feel my own feelings about them, and no one else's.
Because honestly, I have no use for solidarity. Seems to me a parasite-concept, something manipulative individuals use to steal people's life energy and choices and even get them killed for a liar's cause.
There is little I appreciate less than when I hear someone invoking something that I am, like, say, "The Latino or Hispanic vote" or the incredibly nefarious "People of Color", or the by now truly nauseating "the 'LGBTQI+/-' community", and ascribing to in any monolithic characteristics or boiling it all down to a sound bite to win an argument or justify bullshit.
Nope. Nope. Only way is to do my own thing with what I got, with what I'm given. To do my own work my own way. I don't march, I avoid rallies, I don't go to Mass, I don't go to meetings, I don't hold up signs. I do not accept umbrella thinking, I refuse all implicit and tacit agreement with "my own". Extrapolation that I am on anyone's--anyone's--side is irresponsible and always incorrect. I own only myself, and no one owns me. I am not on anybody's side. Don't care how good it sounds, how much you cry about it or try to make me seem like the devil's own turdpolisher. I don't endorse. I keep the distance I need to survive.
Even if I like everything a person makes, even if I gush about their accomplishments and pay them compliments, it's just human recognition. I harbor no illusions that their capacity to generate beautiful and necessary work that I appreciate and have sustained myself with makes them "good" people; I myself am a high-level wretch and have known too many other artists too well. There are only people. I appreciate, I agree, but even when I cry "Yes! Perfect!" I mean only for me, and what I am crying about in that moment, and not for everyone. I do not aggrandize, or engage in idol worship; I do not endorse. I eat what I need to in order to survive.
Should anyone suggest that instead of surviving you ought to give your life to or for a cause, or that the only way to survive is to follow where they lead, or invoke a need to act as they say on behalf an agglomerate of humans, for concepts they say are justice or peace or goodness or right--causes, selves, and ideas they are, of course, selling--just, please.
Think twice. More, if you have to. Don't ever let anyone tell you that there isn't time to think things through. Don't die for a liar. Don't live under shadows.
*
In short, way too much fucked up nonsense gone down because of people all getting together under a banner, and I don't play that shit.
--JL
*read this about myself on the internet when I was twelve years old. It was kind of funny back then, then for a while it wasn't, now it's pretty funny again. I take that pleasure and pride in it which I suspect is reserved specifically for mongrels and especially immigrant mongrels, as it is born of the acceptance of a very particular perspective. Neither fish nor fowl nor good whatever the hell, you hear some stuff you weren't meant to hear and some stuff you can't believe you have to hear again. All such a bad, bad joke.
Anyway, my miscegenation is the bomb and I am the glorious future and the hope of this timeline, fight me
*
Some facts are inherently pleasurable. Pythagorean facts, little truths so elegant as to invoke worship. As some historically significant physicists and mathematicians have put it, that pleasure in finding things out and grasping the connections is the pleasure of discerning the mind of God; one of the goads of the human being, the ecstasy of spirituality, this action the universe takes in coming to know itself. Uncovering the Secrets of the Old One, as Stuart A. Kauffman put it.
*
Continuing from yesterday, one cannot deny the absolute truth of certain labels. "Identities". Roles we have no choice but to play, words we have no choice but to say.
Freedom, by the way, is in no way compromised by these things that our agency cannot shift. One is not unfree merely because one cannot sprout wings and fly into the sky, for example. And it may be that we shall generate descendants, whether "artificial" or analog, who are able to do just that, not that it matters. At any rate, fixed conditions do not abrogate total freedom. I'll elaborate on that stance some other time; I have a different pointless point today.
*
That I am a writer, that I am a man of some kind, that I am Catholic, that I am an American citizen, that I am an immigrant, that I am an English speaker and a Spanish speaker, that I posses a genetic map which to some worldviews renders me a "mongrel of the worst nightmare variety"*, that I got some mental health and activity quirks, that I am able-bodied and sighted and hearing, that I am a worker, all of these are facts I cannot deny and act as lenses through which I may be viewed and through which I have no choice but to view the world, unless I engage in acts of massive and useless self-denial.
Yeah, they're part of my identity, everyone has them. But a gem isn't its facets; facets are cut into gems by humans, just as identities are etched into you by the world. A gem, just as a human being, is in its material, its components, the arrangement of its atoms, its hardness, the colors at its heart.
Identity is the most outside part, the quickest and least descriptive shorthand. I try to dispense with it insofar as it is possible, but it is undeniable that the outside, being what is in the most constant with the world, will affect how the center holds and looks even to itself, how it is able to signify and codify according to the world. The race thing, my god! An emerald is green and a sapphire is blue and a ruby is red. I got news for you: they are the same stone. But they're not! But they are.
What is meant when it is said that we are made in God's own image is not that we are monkeys that stand upright, which really is a very fundamentally stupid fucking read. To imagine that God put the asshole in just because "he" has one too is simply concussed.
We are God because God is the paradox. God is the universe unfolding and watching the universe unfold from the lowest to the highest, from the incomprehensible micro to beyond the Void. Our atoms are a part of that unfolding, our cells, our tissues, our bodies and spirits and the ideas we generate and the things that we make, from the greatest to the least.
Alpha and Omega. One over infinity and infinity over one.
*
So when I admit to these labels, it essential to qualify that I see these things in my own way and have drawn my own conclusions, because I make a conscious efforts to feel my own feelings about them, and no one else's.
Because honestly, I have no use for solidarity. Seems to me a parasite-concept, something manipulative individuals use to steal people's life energy and choices and even get them killed for a liar's cause.
There is little I appreciate less than when I hear someone invoking something that I am, like, say, "The Latino or Hispanic vote" or the incredibly nefarious "People of Color", or the by now truly nauseating "the 'LGBTQI+/-' community", and ascribing to in any monolithic characteristics or boiling it all down to a sound bite to win an argument or justify bullshit.
Nope. Nope. Only way is to do my own thing with what I got, with what I'm given. To do my own work my own way. I don't march, I avoid rallies, I don't go to Mass, I don't go to meetings, I don't hold up signs. I do not accept umbrella thinking, I refuse all implicit and tacit agreement with "my own". Extrapolation that I am on anyone's--anyone's--side is irresponsible and always incorrect. I own only myself, and no one owns me. I am not on anybody's side. Don't care how good it sounds, how much you cry about it or try to make me seem like the devil's own turdpolisher. I don't endorse. I keep the distance I need to survive.
Even if I like everything a person makes, even if I gush about their accomplishments and pay them compliments, it's just human recognition. I harbor no illusions that their capacity to generate beautiful and necessary work that I appreciate and have sustained myself with makes them "good" people; I myself am a high-level wretch and have known too many other artists too well. There are only people. I appreciate, I agree, but even when I cry "Yes! Perfect!" I mean only for me, and what I am crying about in that moment, and not for everyone. I do not aggrandize, or engage in idol worship; I do not endorse. I eat what I need to in order to survive.
Should anyone suggest that instead of surviving you ought to give your life to or for a cause, or that the only way to survive is to follow where they lead, or invoke a need to act as they say on behalf an agglomerate of humans, for concepts they say are justice or peace or goodness or right--causes, selves, and ideas they are, of course, selling--just, please.
Think twice. More, if you have to. Don't ever let anyone tell you that there isn't time to think things through. Don't die for a liar. Don't live under shadows.
*
In short, way too much fucked up nonsense gone down because of people all getting together under a banner, and I don't play that shit.
--JL
*read this about myself on the internet when I was twelve years old. It was kind of funny back then, then for a while it wasn't, now it's pretty funny again. I take that pleasure and pride in it which I suspect is reserved specifically for mongrels and especially immigrant mongrels, as it is born of the acceptance of a very particular perspective. Neither fish nor fowl nor good whatever the hell, you hear some stuff you weren't meant to hear and some stuff you can't believe you have to hear again. All such a bad, bad joke.
Anyway, my miscegenation is the bomb and I am the glorious future and the hope of this timeline, fight me
Monday, February 18, 2019
#118
Stated this in brief before, but it really bears delving into: to be unaffiliated is the only position I am comfortable holding; not a joiner. Frankly, it's an ethical point with me.
This is not the attitude that helps to make strong societies and likely a symptom of being born in a city, living in cities in two different countries, and seasoned in cities and around city people, but I place extremely high value on my individualism, personal space, and ability to change living spaces, disappear, and cross lines I expect others not to cross.
Shitty, but true. Like I say, not an attitude that builds tightly-knit communities. Not an attitude that drives me to join, say, book clubs. You might know that I like books a lot. Never been in a book club.
Life is largely designed around getting people to join in on shit, to join shit, and in general to focus their lives on buying themselves a bunch of titles for their capital, of every description. I have resented it since kindergarten, like with fucking naptime. I have never been a sleepy person. I have taken about ten naps my entire life. I wasn't sleepy at fricking goddamn naptime and all I could do was stare at the turned-off flourescents, silently raging at being forced to endure this indignity just because, as I had been told when I asked why I had to sleep if I didn't want to sleep, it is time for the class to sleep, and you are part of the class, and so when the other kids sleep, you sleep, whether you want to or not.
Holy mother, being angry at that has taken up my entire life. That bullshit answer IS THE ENTIRE WORLD, EVERY HUMAN SYSTEM DREAMED UP SPECIFICALLY TO JERK YOUR CHAIN. It is my prerogative to stay the fuck awake, teacher! Fuck youuuuuuuuuuuu*
So I have never done very well in school, as an example, even though my nerditry is plain to all and sundry. The pile of blank government paper behind this laptop keeps growing. Stuff like that.
*
There have been many voluntary efforts. My mom has always pushed me into things and much though I may have resented and detested it, the main evolutionary objective of such mothering was achieved: I am not a sociopath, I care about people and believe in making good relations with the world, in the ethical nature of certain social obligations and social survival. Try to live by the golden rule as best one can and all.
Tried to be in the poetry community and burnt out, twice. Proud of some stuff I was able to accomplish which I would not have had the opportunity to do otherwise, like teaching, and it is important to do the work of letting people say words to each other in public for the stated purpose of making art out of those words, or at any rate, to have that work done. Had the opportunity to be fully responsible for such a space and fulfill such a duty and did it for a year. I'm glad I did it, but it fucking sucked. I tried to love it and that made me hate it so much more in the end.
The heart can't take forced love indefinitely. It is leave or die sometimes.
Also hung out with a lot of activists, a lot of folk punks, even lived in a hard-left co-op. The highly social nature of these experiences taught me a lot and I met a lot of people who affected my life very positively, but always at the individual level; in general I believe nothing could have soured me more on joining and community and basically life than running in those circles.
Been on sports teams, but as far as the team sports, by and large I loathed them. Football, lacrosse, waterpolo, track and field, all terrible experiences which I saw through to the end because I have a martyr complex and as every society in the world tries to hammer home, quitters don't prosper. Track and field, man. Track is already just a bunch of the worst ideas, and then, you add team members. Track is a circle of hell. Think about it for even a second, it's perfect.
At best I was able to endure some by focusing very hard on the positives. I had one good season of playing soccer in middle school, but that was after wrestling got me into real shape and after finally gaining a true grasp of the game at this intensive two-week soccer clinic my mom signed me and my brothers up for, both of which eluded me back in a childhood where the only thing ninety percent of the dudes around me cared about was soccer. Basketball is fun enough to get over how extremely teamy it is, though I always sucked hard at it. Middling defensive player, and that at my finest, most dazzling moments.
I like wrestling, and swimming, and singles tennis. And most of all, walking by myself.
*
Working with people to make money together is about the best I can do. It's not easy for any of us in any case, even if everybody really likes each other. I mean, it's work. But work is the one team effort and societal pillar I am one hundred percent into and about. Given my adult life to the service industry, stand by that decision, intend to keep right on working. I go way out of my way to be a good worker and a good co-worker. About it.
*
All this by way of saying that I cannot abide labels, boxes, card-carrying memberships, accreditations, ranks and titles, any of that ilk; any medals pinned to your chest, letters added to your name, or access and legitimacy based on gatekeeping and the consuming and parroting of ideology: I am not an anarchist or a fascist or an authoritarian a communist or a socialist or right or left or center or a "libertarian" or a humanist or an existentialist or a stoic or a pessimist or an optimist or a realist or a pragmatist or a futurist. I deny affiliation with any school, any body of thought, any political doctrine, any system of logic (although there is Wittgenstein. Hard act to follow.). It is all up in the air to me. I think lots of stuff in common with pretty much everything I have just mentioned and a lot more besides, but I disagree with all of it. None of that stuff works for me. I work out my own ethics best I can. I think out my own ideas best I can. I make my own choices best I can. That's all I can honestly say.
Not even a cook, which is my job. Strictly speaking, I am a kitchen worker, capable of much that a cook is but with only experience and skills to prove it.
Because of course there are labels I must accept and about which I have no choice, labels which are definitional and indivisible from myself.
*
Haha, it's not over yet, folks. Part two of this post comes tomorrow! And I will talk about myself still more! Trust me, I can do this for years. Strap in.
--JL
*yo, her name was Mrs. Applegate and she was a wonderful teacher. Props to that good lady.
This is not the attitude that helps to make strong societies and likely a symptom of being born in a city, living in cities in two different countries, and seasoned in cities and around city people, but I place extremely high value on my individualism, personal space, and ability to change living spaces, disappear, and cross lines I expect others not to cross.
Shitty, but true. Like I say, not an attitude that builds tightly-knit communities. Not an attitude that drives me to join, say, book clubs. You might know that I like books a lot. Never been in a book club.
Life is largely designed around getting people to join in on shit, to join shit, and in general to focus their lives on buying themselves a bunch of titles for their capital, of every description. I have resented it since kindergarten, like with fucking naptime. I have never been a sleepy person. I have taken about ten naps my entire life. I wasn't sleepy at fricking goddamn naptime and all I could do was stare at the turned-off flourescents, silently raging at being forced to endure this indignity just because, as I had been told when I asked why I had to sleep if I didn't want to sleep, it is time for the class to sleep, and you are part of the class, and so when the other kids sleep, you sleep, whether you want to or not.
Holy mother, being angry at that has taken up my entire life. That bullshit answer IS THE ENTIRE WORLD, EVERY HUMAN SYSTEM DREAMED UP SPECIFICALLY TO JERK YOUR CHAIN. It is my prerogative to stay the fuck awake, teacher! Fuck youuuuuuuuuuuu*
So I have never done very well in school, as an example, even though my nerditry is plain to all and sundry. The pile of blank government paper behind this laptop keeps growing. Stuff like that.
*
There have been many voluntary efforts. My mom has always pushed me into things and much though I may have resented and detested it, the main evolutionary objective of such mothering was achieved: I am not a sociopath, I care about people and believe in making good relations with the world, in the ethical nature of certain social obligations and social survival. Try to live by the golden rule as best one can and all.
Tried to be in the poetry community and burnt out, twice. Proud of some stuff I was able to accomplish which I would not have had the opportunity to do otherwise, like teaching, and it is important to do the work of letting people say words to each other in public for the stated purpose of making art out of those words, or at any rate, to have that work done. Had the opportunity to be fully responsible for such a space and fulfill such a duty and did it for a year. I'm glad I did it, but it fucking sucked. I tried to love it and that made me hate it so much more in the end.
The heart can't take forced love indefinitely. It is leave or die sometimes.
Also hung out with a lot of activists, a lot of folk punks, even lived in a hard-left co-op. The highly social nature of these experiences taught me a lot and I met a lot of people who affected my life very positively, but always at the individual level; in general I believe nothing could have soured me more on joining and community and basically life than running in those circles.
Been on sports teams, but as far as the team sports, by and large I loathed them. Football, lacrosse, waterpolo, track and field, all terrible experiences which I saw through to the end because I have a martyr complex and as every society in the world tries to hammer home, quitters don't prosper. Track and field, man. Track is already just a bunch of the worst ideas, and then, you add team members. Track is a circle of hell. Think about it for even a second, it's perfect.
At best I was able to endure some by focusing very hard on the positives. I had one good season of playing soccer in middle school, but that was after wrestling got me into real shape and after finally gaining a true grasp of the game at this intensive two-week soccer clinic my mom signed me and my brothers up for, both of which eluded me back in a childhood where the only thing ninety percent of the dudes around me cared about was soccer. Basketball is fun enough to get over how extremely teamy it is, though I always sucked hard at it. Middling defensive player, and that at my finest, most dazzling moments.
I like wrestling, and swimming, and singles tennis. And most of all, walking by myself.
*
Working with people to make money together is about the best I can do. It's not easy for any of us in any case, even if everybody really likes each other. I mean, it's work. But work is the one team effort and societal pillar I am one hundred percent into and about. Given my adult life to the service industry, stand by that decision, intend to keep right on working. I go way out of my way to be a good worker and a good co-worker. About it.
All this by way of saying that I cannot abide labels, boxes, card-carrying memberships, accreditations, ranks and titles, any of that ilk; any medals pinned to your chest, letters added to your name, or access and legitimacy based on gatekeeping and the consuming and parroting of ideology: I am not an anarchist or a fascist or an authoritarian a communist or a socialist or right or left or center or a "libertarian" or a humanist or an existentialist or a stoic or a pessimist or an optimist or a realist or a pragmatist or a futurist. I deny affiliation with any school, any body of thought, any political doctrine, any system of logic (although there is Wittgenstein. Hard act to follow.). It is all up in the air to me. I think lots of stuff in common with pretty much everything I have just mentioned and a lot more besides, but I disagree with all of it. None of that stuff works for me. I work out my own ethics best I can. I think out my own ideas best I can. I make my own choices best I can. That's all I can honestly say.
Not even a cook, which is my job. Strictly speaking, I am a kitchen worker, capable of much that a cook is but with only experience and skills to prove it.
Because of course there are labels I must accept and about which I have no choice, labels which are definitional and indivisible from myself.
*
Haha, it's not over yet, folks. Part two of this post comes tomorrow! And I will talk about myself still more! Trust me, I can do this for years. Strap in.
--JL
*yo, her name was Mrs. Applegate and she was a wonderful teacher. Props to that good lady.
Saturday, February 16, 2019
#117
Post one hundred and seventeen! Another of my very favorite numbers, and one which has gained significant value through its strong appearances in many video games. Other stuff too, but it looms large in video games.
*
Like John the Master Chief. From Halo. That dude.
You know him.
--JL
*
Like John the Master Chief. From Halo. That dude.
You know him.
--JL
Friday, February 15, 2019
#116
My job is something I take very seriously. This is true about whatever I do which I call work, which includes even my play, but I refer specifically to the job with which I generate capital and pay tax with.
Feeding people is a holy task. That's how I see it. Can't put food out lightly. Can't disrespect the product, disregard the result, or let people eat garbage. People are down to eat garbage, will even yammer about their right to eat garbage. You're still wrong to feed it to them.
Food is literal, and also a metaphor. Food is everything. Gotta eat.
--JL
Feeding people is a holy task. That's how I see it. Can't put food out lightly. Can't disrespect the product, disregard the result, or let people eat garbage. People are down to eat garbage, will even yammer about their right to eat garbage. You're still wrong to feed it to them.
Food is literal, and also a metaphor. Food is everything. Gotta eat.
--JL
Thursday, February 14, 2019
#115
History is some crazy stuff. These histories of Showa Japan have got my fever going. Next I think I shall dive into Thucydides' The Peloponnesian War, or perhaps shorten the step and read The River of Lost Footsteps by Thant Myint-U. I've been meaning to get to J.M. Barrie's History of Europe for some months and this book by Robert Levin called A Geography of Time for a couple years now.
Yeah, I think I'm ready for a long, manic nonfiction jag.
Some point this year though, The Decameron. Last summer as we drove many hours the narcissist ex and I listened to a CD lecture course on the Black Death by Purdue professor Dr. Dorsey Armstrong, who I wished wouldn't try to be funny and maybe states some of her opinionated interpretations as fact but who overall delivers a knockout, very well thought data brick on that crazy ole plague. She talked about Boccaccio a great deal, which I loved. Been meaning to get into it with him.
*
Fernando Pessoa is a great writer and his images and moods and ideas are good, everything is in place and I like the book, but I'm not making much headway in The Book of Disquiet because it lends itself so marvelously to being drunk in small sips over a long period in whatever page order you please. Also I find myself rereading a passage I've already completed by accident and finding it a different animal than it was before, sentences in a different order than I had thought, words I had missed, meanings askew or multiplied or shifted slightly in tone; the tome seems ensorcelled, slippery with mist, its particles constantly rearranging themselves in a swirl of smoke.
--JL
Yeah, I think I'm ready for a long, manic nonfiction jag.
Some point this year though, The Decameron. Last summer as we drove many hours the narcissist ex and I listened to a CD lecture course on the Black Death by Purdue professor Dr. Dorsey Armstrong, who I wished wouldn't try to be funny and maybe states some of her opinionated interpretations as fact but who overall delivers a knockout, very well thought data brick on that crazy ole plague. She talked about Boccaccio a great deal, which I loved. Been meaning to get into it with him.
*
Fernando Pessoa is a great writer and his images and moods and ideas are good, everything is in place and I like the book, but I'm not making much headway in The Book of Disquiet because it lends itself so marvelously to being drunk in small sips over a long period in whatever page order you please. Also I find myself rereading a passage I've already completed by accident and finding it a different animal than it was before, sentences in a different order than I had thought, words I had missed, meanings askew or multiplied or shifted slightly in tone; the tome seems ensorcelled, slippery with mist, its particles constantly rearranging themselves in a swirl of smoke.
--JL
Wednesday, February 13, 2019
#114
This is going to be a long, weird post. It will no doubt serve as a good reason for many people to avoid my work, but what can I do? No different.
*
I was baptized a Roman Catholic, and have been in a crisis over it ever since I began to grasp its implications. Every second of every day of my life has been spent wrestling with them, whether directly in the forefront of my conscious mind, drunkenly wrestling with demons, or taking up a permanent place on my back burner. I was an atheist for seventeen years. Made no difference.
Can't unknow. Or unlearn. Play pretend, try to forget. Live long enough, it'll catch up to you, or be the thing that kills you.
The Church and I have some problems between us. I've written a fable about it. Didn't feel much at my Confirmation, had a terrifying and incomplete First Confession, didn't feel anything when I accepted the Eucharist. Already it all seemed to me somehow some kind of front. Some bad stuff had happened to me in life and I had seen much worse happen to others by the time these ceremonies came around, and my Jesuitical education was perhaps too good at fostering a spirit of scepticism and scientific inquiry. Later in life I came across the writings of Sextus Empiricus and I was all "right, right. yup".
To make what is already too long of a story short, since I have a lot to get through yet, I do not trust the sacraments. More precisely, I do not trust other men to deliver the sacraments unto me. It gives me no particular pleasure to say it and I use no malice when I say that this Church is no one true Church. Popes are just men, usually even exceptionally venal ones; worse creatures than the human beings they treat like sheep and manipulate like sheep. Fuck popes, fuck this current pope in particular; I take this pope's bullshit very personally. Also, of course, foundation of blood, rivers of blood, oppression, slavery, children's crusades, pederasty, pedophilia, sexual slavery, child pornography, rape and protecting rapists, enabling or directly enacting many genocides, etc.
Not to say that the Church is evil. It is made up of human beings and is human. It is responsible for some of the most wonderful events in history, some of the most wonderful works of art ever produced, has been a spiritual home for some of the greatest and most human individuals that ever breathed and spoke and thought and wrote. I would not change one thing about the history of the Church, about any part of the human story.
God made humans. Humans make popes, and priests, and books, and limited conceptions of that which they name God. Human things. Beyond good and evil and under a doom of good and evil, compassing the heights and depths, the full spectra, and transcending being.
Ultimately, what I believe is that God is in the infinite paradox, in the unavoidable correctness of supratotality. I believe in God because I believe that the universe is absolutely and without equivocation perfect, and so is every other universe. I have chosen to love everything in it, everything and everyone.
Naturally we have our own immediate concerns, our challenges and duties, our limited perspectives to deal with and our pressures to survive. It's fine to sing universal love and the holy spirit permeating all existence, but on a more granular level, we have inheritances to deal with, and the eternally impermanent nature of the world means we always have battles to fight. I feel I cannot avoid being outside the Church, if I am to be a Catholic; and I am, because that is my inheritance, because baptism is done through water, and water is the holiest thing on this Earth, sacrosanct and fundamentally incorruptible. I am, for I also believe in the Resurrection, and the Ascension. I believe Elijah was carried up, I believe Isaiah spoke through a live coal, and I believe Moses looked upon the Countenance. I believe that Christ set us free, absolutely free, and therefore we are bound to answer for our choices.
So I believe in these, the times that we were born to, I must find ways to serve as my own priest, or to let the world serve as my priest, to deliver myself unto the sacraments rather than have them delivered unto me.
*
Therefore, in order to perform the sacrament of confession, I have determined to give confession to the world, that none may mistake me for what I am not merely because I whisper my secrets in the dark. I have determined to tell the truth about the evil, harm, and hurt I commit and that I cause, knowingly and unknowingly, as truthfully and completely as I can, unsparing.
*
Beginning with the primary qualities, and sticking to the brief and categorical deed-types they have been material to, using detail only for special illustration in the interest of saying everything I have proven myself capable from of childhood to now in one fell swoop:
cowardice, hypocrisy, stubbornness, impatience, denial, disloyalty, rage, self-pity, hotheadedness, extreme drunkenness, gluttony, wastefulness, arrogance, laziness, lust, pride, vanity, selfishness, destructiveness, prejudice, contempt, hardness of heart, gracelessness, ingratitude, forgetfulness with negative consequences for others, lying to myself constantly and quite enough to be getting on with to others, desire to inflict pain as punishment, inflicting pain as punishment whether through specially calibrated words or in combat or slapping a friend or teammate upside his head, acting in vengeance, leading others astray, cold and calculated thinking and speaking, breaking promises, nonconstructive and willfully negative rhetoric, failing to think before I speak or act or refine my thinking and acting process skilfully, self-harm, standing in baseless judgment of others or things beyond my current scope of understanding, talking about something I don't know about as though I do, belittling others intellectually in order to make myself feel smarter and better about myself, acting as though my qualities and deeds put me above others, looking for fights, breaking the law because I feel like it, breaking rules just to fuck 'em, casual blasphemy (not just Christian blasphemy; if people believe it, I've blasphemed it), rudeness, edgelording, trolling, merciless and spiteful unfair mockery, emotional divorce of self, standing by with my hands in my pockets while terrible things happen right before my eyes, not raising my voice for what I think is right or important when really how little is that to ask, letting my paranoia get the better of me, submitting to the status quo or silence or someone else's will when I knew better, blurring lines of consent and allowing bad communication and bad faith with romantic partners and also breaking up with them in and at terrible wrenching ways and times, thoughts so hideous and abominable I shudder to recall even the shadow of them, abandoning friends even as I cry because friends have abandoned me, placing blame outside myself when have no business doing that, blaming myself alone when I have no business doing that, littering, excessively ugly cursing and casual use of racial slurs, thinking and acting like I'm too good or brilliant for a place or person and ditching out, copping a bunch of dang attitude, letting being an asshole be a kneejerk thing or going way overboard with it, hella bragging, baseless hostility, wallowing in self-pity, consciously acting like things are worse than they are or I feel worse than I do in order to get out of situations or avoid problems or labor, making decisions for people and abrogating their agency when it was not my place, knowingly risky behavior, enabling or talking soft to people and letting their shit slide and their thinking degenerate when I should have been firm and straight up and had the courage to correct them, cheating at card and board games, thievery, deliberate disruption of organized activity, trespassing, hustling, delinquency, truancy, pushing aside all feeling in place of true forgiveness or healing, minimizing other people's experiences, flippant or deflective stances when the sober truth would have served best, letting someone cover for my mistakes or bear the brunt of my bad decisions so I won't have to, shirking responsibilities in general, squandering opportunities, justifying and rationalizing my complicity and bad behavior and that of others, allowing others to abuse me, drunken ruckus such as screaming at people and public disturbance even to the point of an arrest on one occasion, drinking when I damn well know I am an alcoholic, burning all my bridges and throwing my life out the window which doesn't only affect me because I do not live in a vacuum, isolating myself out of preciousness or temper or pure foolishness, and doing the wrong thing entirely on purpose just because.
*
Worked hard to summon it all up and move my fingers to type.
Very much felt something. Feeling lots of things right now. Lots of stories.
--JL
*
I was baptized a Roman Catholic, and have been in a crisis over it ever since I began to grasp its implications. Every second of every day of my life has been spent wrestling with them, whether directly in the forefront of my conscious mind, drunkenly wrestling with demons, or taking up a permanent place on my back burner. I was an atheist for seventeen years. Made no difference.
Can't unknow. Or unlearn. Play pretend, try to forget. Live long enough, it'll catch up to you, or be the thing that kills you.
The Church and I have some problems between us. I've written a fable about it. Didn't feel much at my Confirmation, had a terrifying and incomplete First Confession, didn't feel anything when I accepted the Eucharist. Already it all seemed to me somehow some kind of front. Some bad stuff had happened to me in life and I had seen much worse happen to others by the time these ceremonies came around, and my Jesuitical education was perhaps too good at fostering a spirit of scepticism and scientific inquiry. Later in life I came across the writings of Sextus Empiricus and I was all "right, right. yup".
To make what is already too long of a story short, since I have a lot to get through yet, I do not trust the sacraments. More precisely, I do not trust other men to deliver the sacraments unto me. It gives me no particular pleasure to say it and I use no malice when I say that this Church is no one true Church. Popes are just men, usually even exceptionally venal ones; worse creatures than the human beings they treat like sheep and manipulate like sheep. Fuck popes, fuck this current pope in particular; I take this pope's bullshit very personally. Also, of course, foundation of blood, rivers of blood, oppression, slavery, children's crusades, pederasty, pedophilia, sexual slavery, child pornography, rape and protecting rapists, enabling or directly enacting many genocides, etc.
Not to say that the Church is evil. It is made up of human beings and is human. It is responsible for some of the most wonderful events in history, some of the most wonderful works of art ever produced, has been a spiritual home for some of the greatest and most human individuals that ever breathed and spoke and thought and wrote. I would not change one thing about the history of the Church, about any part of the human story.
God made humans. Humans make popes, and priests, and books, and limited conceptions of that which they name God. Human things. Beyond good and evil and under a doom of good and evil, compassing the heights and depths, the full spectra, and transcending being.
Ultimately, what I believe is that God is in the infinite paradox, in the unavoidable correctness of supratotality. I believe in God because I believe that the universe is absolutely and without equivocation perfect, and so is every other universe. I have chosen to love everything in it, everything and everyone.
Naturally we have our own immediate concerns, our challenges and duties, our limited perspectives to deal with and our pressures to survive. It's fine to sing universal love and the holy spirit permeating all existence, but on a more granular level, we have inheritances to deal with, and the eternally impermanent nature of the world means we always have battles to fight. I feel I cannot avoid being outside the Church, if I am to be a Catholic; and I am, because that is my inheritance, because baptism is done through water, and water is the holiest thing on this Earth, sacrosanct and fundamentally incorruptible. I am, for I also believe in the Resurrection, and the Ascension. I believe Elijah was carried up, I believe Isaiah spoke through a live coal, and I believe Moses looked upon the Countenance. I believe that Christ set us free, absolutely free, and therefore we are bound to answer for our choices.
So I believe in these, the times that we were born to, I must find ways to serve as my own priest, or to let the world serve as my priest, to deliver myself unto the sacraments rather than have them delivered unto me.
*
Therefore, in order to perform the sacrament of confession, I have determined to give confession to the world, that none may mistake me for what I am not merely because I whisper my secrets in the dark. I have determined to tell the truth about the evil, harm, and hurt I commit and that I cause, knowingly and unknowingly, as truthfully and completely as I can, unsparing.
*
Beginning with the primary qualities, and sticking to the brief and categorical deed-types they have been material to, using detail only for special illustration in the interest of saying everything I have proven myself capable from of childhood to now in one fell swoop:
cowardice, hypocrisy, stubbornness, impatience, denial, disloyalty, rage, self-pity, hotheadedness, extreme drunkenness, gluttony, wastefulness, arrogance, laziness, lust, pride, vanity, selfishness, destructiveness, prejudice, contempt, hardness of heart, gracelessness, ingratitude, forgetfulness with negative consequences for others, lying to myself constantly and quite enough to be getting on with to others, desire to inflict pain as punishment, inflicting pain as punishment whether through specially calibrated words or in combat or slapping a friend or teammate upside his head, acting in vengeance, leading others astray, cold and calculated thinking and speaking, breaking promises, nonconstructive and willfully negative rhetoric, failing to think before I speak or act or refine my thinking and acting process skilfully, self-harm, standing in baseless judgment of others or things beyond my current scope of understanding, talking about something I don't know about as though I do, belittling others intellectually in order to make myself feel smarter and better about myself, acting as though my qualities and deeds put me above others, looking for fights, breaking the law because I feel like it, breaking rules just to fuck 'em, casual blasphemy (not just Christian blasphemy; if people believe it, I've blasphemed it), rudeness, edgelording, trolling, merciless and spiteful unfair mockery, emotional divorce of self, standing by with my hands in my pockets while terrible things happen right before my eyes, not raising my voice for what I think is right or important when really how little is that to ask, letting my paranoia get the better of me, submitting to the status quo or silence or someone else's will when I knew better, blurring lines of consent and allowing bad communication and bad faith with romantic partners and also breaking up with them in and at terrible wrenching ways and times, thoughts so hideous and abominable I shudder to recall even the shadow of them, abandoning friends even as I cry because friends have abandoned me, placing blame outside myself when have no business doing that, blaming myself alone when I have no business doing that, littering, excessively ugly cursing and casual use of racial slurs, thinking and acting like I'm too good or brilliant for a place or person and ditching out, copping a bunch of dang attitude, letting being an asshole be a kneejerk thing or going way overboard with it, hella bragging, baseless hostility, wallowing in self-pity, consciously acting like things are worse than they are or I feel worse than I do in order to get out of situations or avoid problems or labor, making decisions for people and abrogating their agency when it was not my place, knowingly risky behavior, enabling or talking soft to people and letting their shit slide and their thinking degenerate when I should have been firm and straight up and had the courage to correct them, cheating at card and board games, thievery, deliberate disruption of organized activity, trespassing, hustling, delinquency, truancy, pushing aside all feeling in place of true forgiveness or healing, minimizing other people's experiences, flippant or deflective stances when the sober truth would have served best, letting someone cover for my mistakes or bear the brunt of my bad decisions so I won't have to, shirking responsibilities in general, squandering opportunities, justifying and rationalizing my complicity and bad behavior and that of others, allowing others to abuse me, drunken ruckus such as screaming at people and public disturbance even to the point of an arrest on one occasion, drinking when I damn well know I am an alcoholic, burning all my bridges and throwing my life out the window which doesn't only affect me because I do not live in a vacuum, isolating myself out of preciousness or temper or pure foolishness, and doing the wrong thing entirely on purpose just because.
*
Worked hard to summon it all up and move my fingers to type.
Very much felt something. Feeling lots of things right now. Lots of stories.
--JL
Tuesday, February 12, 2019
#113
One time this buddy of mine told me that he was trying to get the location of a mutual friend's wildcrafted marijuana, somewhere in one of the many local woods. He would spring the question at him at odd times, right after smoking, in the middle of a critical gaming moment, setting up long, meandering conversations around the subject in hopes of gleaning some form of data which might lead him to the motherlode.
Don't want to give you the wrong impression, though. I am not describing a scoundrel, by any means. Like basically every dude, there are merely certain aspects and areas of existence around which very few scruples come into play for him.
Second dude never did crack, was the point, but in a very relaxed way. Never told the guy to cut the shit, never lost his composure, always slowly and smilingly revealed nothing. The way the first dude boiled it down was this characteristic exchange:
"So where's that dro patch at, bro?"
"Where the dro patch grows, man."
Deliciously tautological, no? Better for the fact that "dro" is hydroponically grown in particular equipment and almost always indoors, electricity being a relevant, even crucial factor.
The dro patch; only ever a figment, a koan about nothing.
--JL
Don't want to give you the wrong impression, though. I am not describing a scoundrel, by any means. Like basically every dude, there are merely certain aspects and areas of existence around which very few scruples come into play for him.
Second dude never did crack, was the point, but in a very relaxed way. Never told the guy to cut the shit, never lost his composure, always slowly and smilingly revealed nothing. The way the first dude boiled it down was this characteristic exchange:
"So where's that dro patch at, bro?"
"Where the dro patch grows, man."
Deliciously tautological, no? Better for the fact that "dro" is hydroponically grown in particular equipment and almost always indoors, electricity being a relevant, even crucial factor.
The dro patch; only ever a figment, a koan about nothing.
--JL
Monday, February 11, 2019
#112
Man, I'm gonna take the ads off when I finish this post. I saw them on a friend's phone and they were just nasty. Not aesthetic. I don't need that shit around at any price or advantage.
*
Inevitable as the pandoria of ills that uniquely plague the human organism may be, the sublime element is just as inexorable and everpresent.
*
Thinking specifically of rape, suicide, murder, torture, war, genocide, and enslavement (fun post today, folks), the arrangement can be seen as helical: each consistently interfering and interweaving with one another and with the life of everyone I have ever known in brutal, undeniable, and direct terms, and each constantly interweaving themselves into and defining the life of the world, that thing we call history.
That the political is personal has always seemed to me an unnecessary statement. That information is in definition one of the word "political" and also in a very popular and apt definition of what a human being is, which is a political animal. Presented as a sinecure for the attitudes of apolitical or politically apathetic people, I don't understand who they're kidding. People know that. They understand exactly why they don't give a flying fuck. They take it personally.
I am much more interested in the human as a historical animal, in human beings as subjects for whom the historical is personal; the animal with a historical sense for whom the history of the world--not the history of the nation or the family or the tribe or the state, but for whom the history of all humankind is personal. Apolitical attitudes are whatever to me, but ahistorical or historically disingenuous or apathetic attitudes seem to me far, far more damaging and poisonous.
Our political lives would, I think, improve dramatically if more people were exposed to and understood more history from more places about more people, and took it seriously.
*
For a while, at least. There is no permanence in any improvement, victory, ground gained, or agreements reached. Sad fact, but even the very best and seemingly eternal of our words and deeds can only last but a little span of time, are born as doomed to the fate of the temporal as any one of us.
Gotta believe that little while is worth it while it lasts, though. That this terrible, implacable DNA adds up to something that can transcend its nature even for a moment. That the whole thing can work because it is mirrored by another helix, one of kindness, healing, respect, peace, freedom, creativity, joy, honor, wisdom, generosity material and of thought and spirit, and numberless other proteins.
Because of who I am, I believe the latter helix carries more weight, bears more significance than the former. I hope this is true in general, that the math checks out, but for me, it is the truth.
*
Okay, try to have a good day, everybody. I am excited to go to work and to walk in the pretty snow to get there. It is cold and February is hard and this climate thing, well, dang, but spring's still coming.
Be well.
--JL
*
Inevitable as the pandoria of ills that uniquely plague the human organism may be, the sublime element is just as inexorable and everpresent.
*
Thinking specifically of rape, suicide, murder, torture, war, genocide, and enslavement (fun post today, folks), the arrangement can be seen as helical: each consistently interfering and interweaving with one another and with the life of everyone I have ever known in brutal, undeniable, and direct terms, and each constantly interweaving themselves into and defining the life of the world, that thing we call history.
That the political is personal has always seemed to me an unnecessary statement. That information is in definition one of the word "political" and also in a very popular and apt definition of what a human being is, which is a political animal. Presented as a sinecure for the attitudes of apolitical or politically apathetic people, I don't understand who they're kidding. People know that. They understand exactly why they don't give a flying fuck. They take it personally.
I am much more interested in the human as a historical animal, in human beings as subjects for whom the historical is personal; the animal with a historical sense for whom the history of the world--not the history of the nation or the family or the tribe or the state, but for whom the history of all humankind is personal. Apolitical attitudes are whatever to me, but ahistorical or historically disingenuous or apathetic attitudes seem to me far, far more damaging and poisonous.
Our political lives would, I think, improve dramatically if more people were exposed to and understood more history from more places about more people, and took it seriously.
*
For a while, at least. There is no permanence in any improvement, victory, ground gained, or agreements reached. Sad fact, but even the very best and seemingly eternal of our words and deeds can only last but a little span of time, are born as doomed to the fate of the temporal as any one of us.
Gotta believe that little while is worth it while it lasts, though. That this terrible, implacable DNA adds up to something that can transcend its nature even for a moment. That the whole thing can work because it is mirrored by another helix, one of kindness, healing, respect, peace, freedom, creativity, joy, honor, wisdom, generosity material and of thought and spirit, and numberless other proteins.
Because of who I am, I believe the latter helix carries more weight, bears more significance than the former. I hope this is true in general, that the math checks out, but for me, it is the truth.
*
Okay, try to have a good day, everybody. I am excited to go to work and to walk in the pretty snow to get there. It is cold and February is hard and this climate thing, well, dang, but spring's still coming.
Be well.
--JL
Sunday, February 10, 2019
#111
Wow! Post one hundred and eleven! That is the birthday Bilbo Baggins celebrates at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings! One Gross! Three ones in a row! One plus one plus one is three! Without question, one of the best and most special numbers of all!
Incredible. It is a small and factually pointless thing, but I am brimming with joy to be writing this one hundred and eleventh post.
*
Sometimes you wake up empty. The world has faded in the suprareal ur-presence of the Void. You know that you are only alive out of a tired and irrational sense of duty. Your best weapons and armor, which you worked so hard to forge in the fires of putting one foot in the other despite it all and tempered in the water of not putting a decisive and irrevocable end to your own life, have shattered and fallen to the ground, not for the first time, and once again you face the truth: there is no reason to live, and there is no significance in existence.
All I got is, don't stop kicking your feet when you feel like you're floating weightless and without value to anyone and nothing but the most loathsome burden to what passes for your own self. Hope they find the ground again. That final trumpet's coming no matter what, and you might find the fire and the water once again before the end. You've survived a lot already. Even if you don't realize it, it made you stronger. Coming face to face with death and fighting your way back to life--there is nothing else that makes one stronger.
I think it's worth the fight, for the times when you don't have to. I think you can always at least try to get up one more time, pick up the hammer one more time, hit the forge one more time.
When we all lay down our arms one day, when the last of us is dead and gone, it won't have mattered, sure, but it won't have mattered that it didn't matter if you make it matter. You are free to determine the significance of your own life, on your own terms.
Personally, I consider life significant and valuable, when I am thinking clearly. Yes, I am one of those madmen that believe in freedom. Therefore, I respect agency. Do what you are going to do.
*
Well, I was going to write some more stuff about something else--something funny, maybe, or perhaps bolster what I was saying by talking about Seneca, but I walked away to eat some dinner and as I ate a movie with Jamie Foxx and Gerard Butler where the former played a brilliant but potentially questionable lawyer and the latter played some kind of maddened Deep State ultratactician going dark justice held me to the end through commercials, a rare occurrence because walking away and watching it later is such an easily available option. Then I got sucked into watching the Grammies with my dad. My dad's a fun dude and these Grammies aren't at all as bad as some I've seen, but I resent having a television in the kitchen.
*
One hundred and eleven! 111!
--JL
Incredible. It is a small and factually pointless thing, but I am brimming with joy to be writing this one hundred and eleventh post.
*
Sometimes you wake up empty. The world has faded in the suprareal ur-presence of the Void. You know that you are only alive out of a tired and irrational sense of duty. Your best weapons and armor, which you worked so hard to forge in the fires of putting one foot in the other despite it all and tempered in the water of not putting a decisive and irrevocable end to your own life, have shattered and fallen to the ground, not for the first time, and once again you face the truth: there is no reason to live, and there is no significance in existence.
All I got is, don't stop kicking your feet when you feel like you're floating weightless and without value to anyone and nothing but the most loathsome burden to what passes for your own self. Hope they find the ground again. That final trumpet's coming no matter what, and you might find the fire and the water once again before the end. You've survived a lot already. Even if you don't realize it, it made you stronger. Coming face to face with death and fighting your way back to life--there is nothing else that makes one stronger.
I think it's worth the fight, for the times when you don't have to. I think you can always at least try to get up one more time, pick up the hammer one more time, hit the forge one more time.
When we all lay down our arms one day, when the last of us is dead and gone, it won't have mattered, sure, but it won't have mattered that it didn't matter if you make it matter. You are free to determine the significance of your own life, on your own terms.
Personally, I consider life significant and valuable, when I am thinking clearly. Yes, I am one of those madmen that believe in freedom. Therefore, I respect agency. Do what you are going to do.
*
Well, I was going to write some more stuff about something else--something funny, maybe, or perhaps bolster what I was saying by talking about Seneca, but I walked away to eat some dinner and as I ate a movie with Jamie Foxx and Gerard Butler where the former played a brilliant but potentially questionable lawyer and the latter played some kind of maddened Deep State ultratactician going dark justice held me to the end through commercials, a rare occurrence because walking away and watching it later is such an easily available option. Then I got sucked into watching the Grammies with my dad. My dad's a fun dude and these Grammies aren't at all as bad as some I've seen, but I resent having a television in the kitchen.
*
One hundred and eleven! 111!
--JL
Friday, February 8, 2019
#110
Sheeeit. This blog has been a little dull lately! Let me tell you a story.
You deserve this.
*
My godfather's children were so close to me and my brothers when we were kids that they were our cousins. I mean, I made absolutely no distinction between them and my blood cousins, and I still do not. I could not. Spent more time with them than with blood last time I was in Venezuela. That's how tight that shit is.
Godfather was my dad's very best friend coming up, and is directly responsible for my being born: my father, being a vital, powerful, courageous, and high-minded man, was getting set to join the Venezuelan army when he was done with high school. My godfather snapped him right out of that crazy-assed nonsense and told him to go the fuck to college, where my father excelled, graduated with a degree in engineering, and launched himself onto a career path which would eventually place him to meet my mother through a friend who was dating my aunt.
At any rate, my parents were able to conceive me in no small part thanks to my godfather, and his kids and my brother and I were in a part of Caracas which was somewhat familiar to them, though not to me. They're eastside, we're northside. We went for a walk because they wanted to show me this cool-ass hill we could climb.
Now, I had heard them being told by their mom and the old lady we were visiting (their grandmother? Their great-aunt? I remember her face and smooth white hair and her thick droopy bare arms and that brown tint some people's glasses have, and her closet full of board games [we all broke our Jumanji cherry that evening, and I was openly disappointed that our lives were not uprooted and our psyches not destroyed by incredible supernatural misfortune]) that we were not to go to "that place", that it was dangerous, that it was dirty, that we could get hurt there and they were absolutely NOT to go there, point, paragraph, end of story.
Obviously not end of story because how could that be possible.
This would wreck my street cred if I had ever bothered to hide it, but I like following the rules, generally speaking; it's in my instinctual makeup to avoid trouble and not start it or look for it. I'm not a cop or a snitch or a preacher, I do whatever the fuck I want* and I believe everyone can pretty much do the same, but I do grit my teeth and very plainly tell the idiots I let drag me into trouble that I wish we could do better with our lives by using but a modicum more of the good sense we were born with.
Not even better! Just, like, make them a little easier. Not even a ton.
Also I smoke drugs.* I've sadly had to break a few laws in order to do this, but then, so did the founding fathers as they chased the blue dream that became my awesome, free-ass life.**
So I did protest before we got to the hill, and was--as is always the case with people like me--loudly asked by all three cousins whether I was a pussy, a coward, a wuss, a loser, etc., and as always I clench my jaw and spell out that no I am none of those things and fine I will go and do the thing, it is just can we not think of a single other thing which will not most specifically make authority likely to become unpleasant?
Approaching the hill suddenly around a corner as we did was such a vista I immediately understood, and when we reached the gate and opened it, began ascent without preamble.
Equator-blue sky at high noon is its own thing, its own whole world of sky. When you're a kid the sky is bigger and it is bluer and it is brighter, true, but this is a sky whose total blue crowns the universe, whose radiance wields a scepter wreathed in sunflame. Looking up from the bottom, swooping up and jutting into the blazing belly of that sky, that forty-seven degree hill of red soil and green tussock looked like the path to God's own embrace. It was titanic.
We had all climbed in silence, five of us, toiling up the hill, hunched over with the effort of coping with the grade and the looseness of the soil, using our hands as much as our feet on the steeper parts. It took us at least ten minutes and a good sweat to get even a third of the way up, and from the little plateau we beheld, from a good four hundred feet up, the little slice of city this height above street level revealed for us. It glittered, proud and ugly and cool and gross and gorgeous and incredible, that weird sprawling valley-mountain city of eternal spring (it's not, any more than it's the earthly cutting of Heaven's branch [for real they say that] but we say that, and it can be believed a surprising amount of the time--even now, I imagine). We ranged in age from four to eight, we stood as kids stand and looked as kids look from a high place on down, and I have never forgotten that view, that hill, that sky, that breeze cooling my sweat and filling my nostrils with the scent of the city and the mountains and the soil.
Then we were told, my brother and I, definitively, that the thing to do was race back down.
The exciting conclusion? My cousin fell and cut his hand wide open on a buried piece of broken glass, and his older sisters freaked out and argued and generally carried on (even bringing God into it as Catholic kids can be very wont to do) as we stumped back to the apartment building while I supported the injured. I'm not a big "I told you so" guy, I prefer to bite my tongue and deal with the problems of the Now, but I was sorely tried that day.
To my surprise, we weren't heavily disciplined, though it quickly became clear that this was because it was just their mom to deal with. Some yelling from her, hidden away from my brother and myself, some tears and tearful apologies. Then we were told to play quietly, and we played Jumanji, as I have mentioned, and we did so very very loudly.
*
Our dads would have fucking creamed us, yo. Not hitting us, mind you, neither of those dudes are big on that, but a pair of howling bellowers they are, really creative and professional, sergeant-major lever screaming, plus hardcore punishments and privations. My mom woulda smacked me upside the head or perhaps even taken her shoe off, after yelling so loud that it is actually quiet, a sort of wildcat's low, back-of-throat hiss-gargle.
Perhaps you have made your own mother or significant other this angry. I shall want a paragraph on the subject, to be handed in to me in the comments, due whenever, I don't really care and won't look.
*
Didn't slip on the ice yesterday! I felt better. Then I played a bunch of Super Nintendo games on a computer that fits in the palm of my hand*** and hooks up to a television that was simply unimaginable in the year the above story took place. Wild shit.
--JL
*within the bounds of subjective reason, duty, self-discipline, and social responsibility
**Hahaha I am so sorry to mention my smoking marijuana in the same breath as the accomplishments of the founders but it's still pretty funny to think they did what they did so Florida Man can just be himself in various ways while existing in the back of a rusted-out pickup truck or soon-to-be-almost-robbed liquor store, and Donald Trump can wear an open bathrobe and nothing else while he eats Mickey D's in the Lincoln Bedroom and fantasizes about like, actually impressing Vladimir Putin, but like he'll really be impressed and like him and everybody will say so. Freedom the true drug, people.
***Okay, I guess that's another illegal thing. I am sorry, Nintendo, I am sorry, FBI, I am sorry Jesus. But guys, I have given no other single company more of my leisure money than I have given Nintendo, and leisure has always been a pretty good chunk of my budget since you only get the one life and I would give it for Nintendo. The contradiction is something we will all have to live with together, as we happily play a healthy mixture of legal and illicit software.
You deserve this.
*
My godfather's children were so close to me and my brothers when we were kids that they were our cousins. I mean, I made absolutely no distinction between them and my blood cousins, and I still do not. I could not. Spent more time with them than with blood last time I was in Venezuela. That's how tight that shit is.
Godfather was my dad's very best friend coming up, and is directly responsible for my being born: my father, being a vital, powerful, courageous, and high-minded man, was getting set to join the Venezuelan army when he was done with high school. My godfather snapped him right out of that crazy-assed nonsense and told him to go the fuck to college, where my father excelled, graduated with a degree in engineering, and launched himself onto a career path which would eventually place him to meet my mother through a friend who was dating my aunt.
At any rate, my parents were able to conceive me in no small part thanks to my godfather, and his kids and my brother and I were in a part of Caracas which was somewhat familiar to them, though not to me. They're eastside, we're northside. We went for a walk because they wanted to show me this cool-ass hill we could climb.
Now, I had heard them being told by their mom and the old lady we were visiting (their grandmother? Their great-aunt? I remember her face and smooth white hair and her thick droopy bare arms and that brown tint some people's glasses have, and her closet full of board games [we all broke our Jumanji cherry that evening, and I was openly disappointed that our lives were not uprooted and our psyches not destroyed by incredible supernatural misfortune]) that we were not to go to "that place", that it was dangerous, that it was dirty, that we could get hurt there and they were absolutely NOT to go there, point, paragraph, end of story.
Obviously not end of story because how could that be possible.
This would wreck my street cred if I had ever bothered to hide it, but I like following the rules, generally speaking; it's in my instinctual makeup to avoid trouble and not start it or look for it. I'm not a cop or a snitch or a preacher, I do whatever the fuck I want* and I believe everyone can pretty much do the same, but I do grit my teeth and very plainly tell the idiots I let drag me into trouble that I wish we could do better with our lives by using but a modicum more of the good sense we were born with.
Not even better! Just, like, make them a little easier. Not even a ton.
Also I smoke drugs.* I've sadly had to break a few laws in order to do this, but then, so did the founding fathers as they chased the blue dream that became my awesome, free-ass life.**
So I did protest before we got to the hill, and was--as is always the case with people like me--loudly asked by all three cousins whether I was a pussy, a coward, a wuss, a loser, etc., and as always I clench my jaw and spell out that no I am none of those things and fine I will go and do the thing, it is just can we not think of a single other thing which will not most specifically make authority likely to become unpleasant?
Approaching the hill suddenly around a corner as we did was such a vista I immediately understood, and when we reached the gate and opened it, began ascent without preamble.
Equator-blue sky at high noon is its own thing, its own whole world of sky. When you're a kid the sky is bigger and it is bluer and it is brighter, true, but this is a sky whose total blue crowns the universe, whose radiance wields a scepter wreathed in sunflame. Looking up from the bottom, swooping up and jutting into the blazing belly of that sky, that forty-seven degree hill of red soil and green tussock looked like the path to God's own embrace. It was titanic.
We had all climbed in silence, five of us, toiling up the hill, hunched over with the effort of coping with the grade and the looseness of the soil, using our hands as much as our feet on the steeper parts. It took us at least ten minutes and a good sweat to get even a third of the way up, and from the little plateau we beheld, from a good four hundred feet up, the little slice of city this height above street level revealed for us. It glittered, proud and ugly and cool and gross and gorgeous and incredible, that weird sprawling valley-mountain city of eternal spring (it's not, any more than it's the earthly cutting of Heaven's branch [for real they say that] but we say that, and it can be believed a surprising amount of the time--even now, I imagine). We ranged in age from four to eight, we stood as kids stand and looked as kids look from a high place on down, and I have never forgotten that view, that hill, that sky, that breeze cooling my sweat and filling my nostrils with the scent of the city and the mountains and the soil.
Then we were told, my brother and I, definitively, that the thing to do was race back down.
The exciting conclusion? My cousin fell and cut his hand wide open on a buried piece of broken glass, and his older sisters freaked out and argued and generally carried on (even bringing God into it as Catholic kids can be very wont to do) as we stumped back to the apartment building while I supported the injured. I'm not a big "I told you so" guy, I prefer to bite my tongue and deal with the problems of the Now, but I was sorely tried that day.
To my surprise, we weren't heavily disciplined, though it quickly became clear that this was because it was just their mom to deal with. Some yelling from her, hidden away from my brother and myself, some tears and tearful apologies. Then we were told to play quietly, and we played Jumanji, as I have mentioned, and we did so very very loudly.
*
Our dads would have fucking creamed us, yo. Not hitting us, mind you, neither of those dudes are big on that, but a pair of howling bellowers they are, really creative and professional, sergeant-major lever screaming, plus hardcore punishments and privations. My mom woulda smacked me upside the head or perhaps even taken her shoe off, after yelling so loud that it is actually quiet, a sort of wildcat's low, back-of-throat hiss-gargle.
Perhaps you have made your own mother or significant other this angry. I shall want a paragraph on the subject, to be handed in to me in the comments, due whenever, I don't really care and won't look.
*
Didn't slip on the ice yesterday! I felt better. Then I played a bunch of Super Nintendo games on a computer that fits in the palm of my hand*** and hooks up to a television that was simply unimaginable in the year the above story took place. Wild shit.
--JL
*within the bounds of subjective reason, duty, self-discipline, and social responsibility
**Hahaha I am so sorry to mention my smoking marijuana in the same breath as the accomplishments of the founders but it's still pretty funny to think they did what they did so Florida Man can just be himself in various ways while existing in the back of a rusted-out pickup truck or soon-to-be-almost-robbed liquor store, and Donald Trump can wear an open bathrobe and nothing else while he eats Mickey D's in the Lincoln Bedroom and fantasizes about like, actually impressing Vladimir Putin, but like he'll really be impressed and like him and everybody will say so. Freedom the true drug, people.
***Okay, I guess that's another illegal thing. I am sorry, Nintendo, I am sorry, FBI, I am sorry Jesus. But guys, I have given no other single company more of my leisure money than I have given Nintendo, and leisure has always been a pretty good chunk of my budget since you only get the one life and I would give it for Nintendo. The contradiction is something we will all have to live with together, as we happily play a healthy mixture of legal and illicit software.
Thursday, February 7, 2019
#109
Well I am burnt the fuck out. Too much work. Too many events. Much too much social interaction. I just want to crawl under a leaf pile and let slugs eat my eyes.
*
Yesterday I watched the last Pirates of the Caribbean movie, made in 2017, six years after the release of the previous one, which came four years after an arguably botched though financially successful trilogy. It was like chewing on a dry pressed cake of powdered narcotics and mood elevators. Felt fine, good even, hell, awesome; tasted astoundingly, unfadingly bitter.
Those movies were Events to me and to the people I grew up with. The filmmakers used up every ounce of good will they had built up with them by way of their scrappy debut effort by the end of the third movie, and then it just kept going. And I hear it will keep going, with a sequel to Dead Men Tell No Tales and some type of franchise reboot.
Why the fuck not. I'll watch them. I'll watch them just to hear the music. Who cares.
I liked the whole first trilogy, personally. But unlike some, I can keep track of small details throughout extended narratives, and am not married to characters acting how I think they should act.
The two made after the trilogy, well. Who is too good for them? Not me. I'll watch shitty pirate movies always. I'm good for it. Not busy. I'm not going to make strong critical arguments in favor of their quality, but I will watch them without complaint. And so will most people, apparently, because they make a lot of money!
Huge amounts. Look it up.
*
Also yesterday I watched a movie with Robert Redford and James Gandolfini which takes place in a military prison. It was heavyhanded and less than economical but pretty all right, even great at times. I think James Gandolfini was probably the best actor ever. 8mm is a strong argument for this, as it is a strong argument for every member of its cast and everyone that helped make it. 8mm is brilliant with no qualifiers. I'm one of those people that thinks Nick Cage is brilliant and just makes bad decisions because he's a fucking wreck, also.
Wrecks oughta look out for one another when possible; gotta see each other clearly because others will not do this for us.
*
I've seen The Sopranos a couple of times now. The ending is the perfect ending.
*
Who gives a fuck about today's post! One of the worst posts ever. I'm going to take a walk and think about dead friends and mistakes I can never fix. Maybe I'll slip on some ice and hurt myself bad enough to feel something.
--JL
*
Yesterday I watched the last Pirates of the Caribbean movie, made in 2017, six years after the release of the previous one, which came four years after an arguably botched though financially successful trilogy. It was like chewing on a dry pressed cake of powdered narcotics and mood elevators. Felt fine, good even, hell, awesome; tasted astoundingly, unfadingly bitter.
Those movies were Events to me and to the people I grew up with. The filmmakers used up every ounce of good will they had built up with them by way of their scrappy debut effort by the end of the third movie, and then it just kept going. And I hear it will keep going, with a sequel to Dead Men Tell No Tales and some type of franchise reboot.
Why the fuck not. I'll watch them. I'll watch them just to hear the music. Who cares.
I liked the whole first trilogy, personally. But unlike some, I can keep track of small details throughout extended narratives, and am not married to characters acting how I think they should act.
Huge amounts. Look it up.
*
Also yesterday I watched a movie with Robert Redford and James Gandolfini which takes place in a military prison. It was heavyhanded and less than economical but pretty all right, even great at times. I think James Gandolfini was probably the best actor ever. 8mm is a strong argument for this, as it is a strong argument for every member of its cast and everyone that helped make it. 8mm is brilliant with no qualifiers. I'm one of those people that thinks Nick Cage is brilliant and just makes bad decisions because he's a fucking wreck, also.
Wrecks oughta look out for one another when possible; gotta see each other clearly because others will not do this for us.
*
I've seen The Sopranos a couple of times now. The ending is the perfect ending.
*
Who gives a fuck about today's post! One of the worst posts ever. I'm going to take a walk and think about dead friends and mistakes I can never fix. Maybe I'll slip on some ice and hurt myself bad enough to feel something.
--JL
Tuesday, February 5, 2019
#108
Wow! I missed you so much, readers. I hate these spans of time in which I can't make it to the laptop.
Well. Maybe we ought not get carried away. I missed filling this text field.
But, I fill it for you!
No. I fill it for me. Beautiful and unique and no doubt clever as you are, I could give two shits. This is masturbation, and you, you just watch.
*
Hahahaha process.
*
Let's see, quick'n dirty. Saw an old friend (highlight of the year so far, 'twas so so good to talk with him and see his art), had an altercation with an old crazy man at work and was forced to gently but firmly and with I think justified use of the word "fuck" and various pertinent modulations of the word "fuck" to throw him out (dude threw a plate, man! And called me an asshole many times), rolled one excellent joint and one so-so, worked a fifty-hour week last week and a double yesterday, got to know some people better, was so tired at a friend's house that I tried to shove some garbage into a stuffed compost container and could not understand why I was having so much trouble, let some Hare Krishna make me say the dang chant and gave the dick a buck for the little book he pressed into my hands (naw I mean nice guy, but seriously, boo to that), played a lot of video games, and smoked far too many cigarettes because I did so much more social stuff than usual. Argh! Wow! Bam! Pow! Good lord.
*
Thus, the blog has been much more sporadic than is my wont. I don't like it, but that's how life can be.
*
There has been a great laxity in telling you about the stuff I have been reading and looking at. So great that I am forced to present you with lists. I used to write a lot of lists, basically for no reason. Lots of people are this way. I cut it out probably around when I was twenty-two, maybe twenty-one. Now, once more into the breach.
New Stuff I Done Read or Finished Since Last I Spoke On The Matter:
The Dark Is Rising Cycle, Susan Cooper
Mr. Palomar, Italo Calvino
Paranatural (ongoing), Zack Morrison (should have been reading this long ago, by all rights, but also kind of glad I slept this long because it was extremely fucking satisfying to have so much of it to read)
One-Punch Man vol. 13, One and Yusuke Murata
The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask and A Link To The Past--Legendary Edition, Akira Himekawa
He Is A Good Boy (final update), KC Green
Stuff I Done Reread Since Last I Spoke On The Matter:
The Filth, Grant Morrison, Chris Weston, Gary Erksine
Stones In Water, Donna Jo Napoli
Cucumber Quest (ongoing), gigi d.g.
Demon Street (ongoing), Aliza Layne
Stuff I Be Reading In Tandem Right Now:
The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa
Threads From the Refugee Crisis, Kate Evans
Showa: A History of Japan, 1926-1939, Shigeru Mizuki
Video Games I Have Been Playing on my 2DS
Pokémon Blue, Red, and Gold versions
The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D
Metroid: Samus Returns
Super Mario Bros. Deluxe
Super Mario 3D Land
*
Got stuff to do and I work to-nite,
so,
peace
out
and,
also,
word
up.
--JL
Well. Maybe we ought not get carried away. I missed filling this text field.
But, I fill it for you!
No. I fill it for me. Beautiful and unique and no doubt clever as you are, I could give two shits. This is masturbation, and you, you just watch.
*
Hahahaha process.
*
Let's see, quick'n dirty. Saw an old friend (highlight of the year so far, 'twas so so good to talk with him and see his art), had an altercation with an old crazy man at work and was forced to gently but firmly and with I think justified use of the word "fuck" and various pertinent modulations of the word "fuck" to throw him out (dude threw a plate, man! And called me an asshole many times), rolled one excellent joint and one so-so, worked a fifty-hour week last week and a double yesterday, got to know some people better, was so tired at a friend's house that I tried to shove some garbage into a stuffed compost container and could not understand why I was having so much trouble, let some Hare Krishna make me say the dang chant and gave the dick a buck for the little book he pressed into my hands (naw I mean nice guy, but seriously, boo to that), played a lot of video games, and smoked far too many cigarettes because I did so much more social stuff than usual. Argh! Wow! Bam! Pow! Good lord.
*
Thus, the blog has been much more sporadic than is my wont. I don't like it, but that's how life can be.
*
There has been a great laxity in telling you about the stuff I have been reading and looking at. So great that I am forced to present you with lists. I used to write a lot of lists, basically for no reason. Lots of people are this way. I cut it out probably around when I was twenty-two, maybe twenty-one. Now, once more into the breach.
New Stuff I Done Read or Finished Since Last I Spoke On The Matter:
The Dark Is Rising Cycle, Susan Cooper
Mr. Palomar, Italo Calvino
Paranatural (ongoing), Zack Morrison (should have been reading this long ago, by all rights, but also kind of glad I slept this long because it was extremely fucking satisfying to have so much of it to read)
One-Punch Man vol. 13, One and Yusuke Murata
The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask and A Link To The Past--Legendary Edition, Akira Himekawa
He Is A Good Boy (final update), KC Green
Stuff I Done Reread Since Last I Spoke On The Matter:
The Filth, Grant Morrison, Chris Weston, Gary Erksine
Stones In Water, Donna Jo Napoli
Cucumber Quest (ongoing), gigi d.g.
Demon Street (ongoing), Aliza Layne
Stuff I Be Reading In Tandem Right Now:
The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa
Threads From the Refugee Crisis, Kate Evans
Showa: A History of Japan, 1926-1939, Shigeru Mizuki
Video Games I Have Been Playing on my 2DS
Pokémon Blue, Red, and Gold versions
The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D
Metroid: Samus Returns
Super Mario Bros. Deluxe
Super Mario 3D Land
*
Got stuff to do and I work to-nite,
so,
peace
out
and,
also,
word
up.
--JL
Friday, February 1, 2019
#107
Two dudes who are older and ostensibly wiser than me both brought up weakness to me today.
One was my father, and he was talking about me. This is cool; my dad and I are cool like that. He was calling me out for smoking cigs, and, y'know, I'm not gonna fight him on that. Smoking cigarettes is a weakness in me. No hard feelings about that statement, I hope I own it. Written some couplets about it. A cigarette tango, some have called it, some who have read my books, which can be easily accessed via the permanent hyperlink robustly installed somewhere not in the text field of this blog. In case you wanted to confirm for yourself that I write about cigarettes, since I have been known to smoke them.
Cigarettes. They are what is for dinner.
While we were smoking a cigarette together, or, cigarettadjacent, the other dude called someone else weak. You've heard dudes call someone weak in the way he did before; certainly it was not my first time to that tonal rodeo, and once again, I did not take the point up with him. I even casually assented. Why shouldn't I?
Weakness isn't a big deal, frankly. Lord knows I possess strengths and capabilities my father does not, and that he possesses weaknesses and cognitive dissonances of his own. People who think saying that is a put-down pretty much misunderstand life. For while I get where these dudes are coming from, while they're not wrong, it's not the whole picture.
Every living thing is weak, is rife with weaknesses. Every living thing is born the weakest it is likely to ever be, and the most probable thing is that it will die soon; most life dies young. Seems brutal, but it isn't. It's pretty metal, but it is not a thing of brutality, of cruelty--it is life, tremendous life, cresting surging bursting crashing life, which subtracts from itself with titanic abandon so as to multiply exponentially.*
It is perfectly true that smoking cigarettes is a nonsense thing inside my head that doesn't do me any good. It is perfectly true that every human being is full of nonsense things, in their heads and other places, that don't do them any good. If one could produce for me a human being that did not possess one single flawed idea, one single vice, no physical flaws, no weaknesses of any kind, one would break reality. Such a thing is a contradiction in terms, like a solid block of oxygen on a beach with a seagull perched on top. Such a creature would be a golem, a construct, a figment, an incredibly weak and flawed human idea. How you would even begin to quantify it without being immediately disingenuous is beyond me, and I would assert, beyond inquiry. You are dealing in irrationalities beyond unreason, in terms that mean something different to every entity that attempts to grasp them.
People who pretend they have conquered all their flaws and vices--through whatever medium, and if they acknowledge ever having had any at all--and live a strong, righteous life using a correct system of thought, belief, and action are some of the funniest punchlines on the planet. They are truly unable to see themselves.
No matter. There will come a day when we all see each other for who we really are, and come to know what a ridiculous and perfectly inane thing it was to waste any little modicum of our lives thinking bad thoughts about each other. That bright day will bring with it the understanding that were all trying our best, struggling with the incomprehensible and fighting the unbeatable every day of our lives, and we will see that each of us, in our own way, triumph.
Basically, I would argue that it is unnecessary to make people feel bad for being weak, that it is unproductive to call them weak, even if you're using shorthand to let them know that their weaknesses are adding up to more than their strengths in a particular context. It'll be worse for everybody if they agree deep inside themselves, which can happen no matter how you say it. Weakness can breed resentment, and resentment is the opposite of strength. Resentment smothers the opportunity for strength.
Rather, tell them to try and be stronger, to make themselves stronger. The chances will be better that they will find that strength in them, that they will believe that strength is within them and can be found. And it is. That strength absolutely exists. As every living thing has its weakness, every living thing has its strength, has its own measure of power, and no power, whatever its apparent size, should ever be underestimated**.
Small stones are indispensable to vast mountains, and play their roles in the greatest upheavals.
--JL
*Some German dude said some stuff like that, adding that life, while not cruel, has made incredible use of cruelty in the human animal, which through the cunning application of cruelty, made itself the strongest living thing; part of that process has been inventing ways to combat its own cruelty lest it murder itself outright. This is a risk all human organisms and all populations deal with in their own way.***
**J.R.R. Tolkien said some stuff like that. And, y'know, God and Jesus Christ. Mr. Tolkien had, there is no doubt, given this some thought. Frankly, it's kind of a theme everywhere you look.
***I'm taking this opportunity to come out as a big fan of this German dude, but I shall not use his name openly for fear of attracting the wrong manner of attention; I do not have any use for cranks, or any desire to rehash all the same arguments in which I have killed bystanders with the singular frustration in my voice. No cranks! No cranking.
One was my father, and he was talking about me. This is cool; my dad and I are cool like that. He was calling me out for smoking cigs, and, y'know, I'm not gonna fight him on that. Smoking cigarettes is a weakness in me. No hard feelings about that statement, I hope I own it. Written some couplets about it. A cigarette tango, some have called it, some who have read my books, which can be easily accessed via the permanent hyperlink robustly installed somewhere not in the text field of this blog. In case you wanted to confirm for yourself that I write about cigarettes, since I have been known to smoke them.
Cigarettes. They are what is for dinner.
While we were smoking a cigarette together, or, cigarettadjacent, the other dude called someone else weak. You've heard dudes call someone weak in the way he did before; certainly it was not my first time to that tonal rodeo, and once again, I did not take the point up with him. I even casually assented. Why shouldn't I?
Weakness isn't a big deal, frankly. Lord knows I possess strengths and capabilities my father does not, and that he possesses weaknesses and cognitive dissonances of his own. People who think saying that is a put-down pretty much misunderstand life. For while I get where these dudes are coming from, while they're not wrong, it's not the whole picture.
Every living thing is weak, is rife with weaknesses. Every living thing is born the weakest it is likely to ever be, and the most probable thing is that it will die soon; most life dies young. Seems brutal, but it isn't. It's pretty metal, but it is not a thing of brutality, of cruelty--it is life, tremendous life, cresting surging bursting crashing life, which subtracts from itself with titanic abandon so as to multiply exponentially.*
It is perfectly true that smoking cigarettes is a nonsense thing inside my head that doesn't do me any good. It is perfectly true that every human being is full of nonsense things, in their heads and other places, that don't do them any good. If one could produce for me a human being that did not possess one single flawed idea, one single vice, no physical flaws, no weaknesses of any kind, one would break reality. Such a thing is a contradiction in terms, like a solid block of oxygen on a beach with a seagull perched on top. Such a creature would be a golem, a construct, a figment, an incredibly weak and flawed human idea. How you would even begin to quantify it without being immediately disingenuous is beyond me, and I would assert, beyond inquiry. You are dealing in irrationalities beyond unreason, in terms that mean something different to every entity that attempts to grasp them.
People who pretend they have conquered all their flaws and vices--through whatever medium, and if they acknowledge ever having had any at all--and live a strong, righteous life using a correct system of thought, belief, and action are some of the funniest punchlines on the planet. They are truly unable to see themselves.
No matter. There will come a day when we all see each other for who we really are, and come to know what a ridiculous and perfectly inane thing it was to waste any little modicum of our lives thinking bad thoughts about each other. That bright day will bring with it the understanding that were all trying our best, struggling with the incomprehensible and fighting the unbeatable every day of our lives, and we will see that each of us, in our own way, triumph.
Basically, I would argue that it is unnecessary to make people feel bad for being weak, that it is unproductive to call them weak, even if you're using shorthand to let them know that their weaknesses are adding up to more than their strengths in a particular context. It'll be worse for everybody if they agree deep inside themselves, which can happen no matter how you say it. Weakness can breed resentment, and resentment is the opposite of strength. Resentment smothers the opportunity for strength.
Rather, tell them to try and be stronger, to make themselves stronger. The chances will be better that they will find that strength in them, that they will believe that strength is within them and can be found. And it is. That strength absolutely exists. As every living thing has its weakness, every living thing has its strength, has its own measure of power, and no power, whatever its apparent size, should ever be underestimated**.
Small stones are indispensable to vast mountains, and play their roles in the greatest upheavals.
--JL
*Some German dude said some stuff like that, adding that life, while not cruel, has made incredible use of cruelty in the human animal, which through the cunning application of cruelty, made itself the strongest living thing; part of that process has been inventing ways to combat its own cruelty lest it murder itself outright. This is a risk all human organisms and all populations deal with in their own way.***
**J.R.R. Tolkien said some stuff like that. And, y'know, God and Jesus Christ. Mr. Tolkien had, there is no doubt, given this some thought. Frankly, it's kind of a theme everywhere you look.
***I'm taking this opportunity to come out as a big fan of this German dude, but I shall not use his name openly for fear of attracting the wrong manner of attention; I do not have any use for cranks, or any desire to rehash all the same arguments in which I have killed bystanders with the singular frustration in my voice. No cranks! No cranking.
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