#146

There used to be a troll in the creek by my house. His brows were the long stalks of grass overshadowing his big old man nose, lapped by the extreme edge of the water so that the creek was his mustache, the steep banks his cheeks.

Now his nose lies on its side in the middle of a broader, shallower version of his former mustache. His brows collapsed years ago. Even back then I watched his cheeks begin to grow hollow.

If I didn't know better, that nose of his could well be just another big rock, half-buried midstream.

Once upon a time a girl and I smoked cigarettes on new platforms of smooth golden wood and talked and drank beers and watched the troll slumber. We worked together and lived together and squandered all our other hours together like young idiots do. For years. One of them, by the creek.

The platform's boards have gone gray-tinged mossy brown with weathering, all the angles and corners windworn. Nails gave out on one part of the walkway, and much of the ground they are planted in has sloughed into the creek. The troll is dead. Haven't seen the girl in a long time. Others have come and gone, some for years in their own right, and still I remember her as I drift my gaze over the flowing waters.

Or I think about other stuff. It's a toss-up. Often enough I get both. The effects of the world are not always consistent.

Creek by my house still flows. I am still an idiot, smoking cigarettes and watching it stay impermanent.


--JL

#145

Unlike the local rivers, which have by and large undergone no major changes in all my time observing them--some important transformations in certain areas, but they don't flow drastically different than they ever did--the creek by my house has done some pretty extensive morphing. If I had to judge by how things go around here, creeks are far more dramatic than rivers.

Creek used to run much broader, never too deep but ten feet across in some places. The banks were shallower near the source but climbed high deeper in the woods, before pooling decisively as it channeled into a pipe running beneath the highway, a second pipe presumably spitting out the creek's further course on the other side.

The construction of the pond, which diverted some of the stream's flow, thinned the creek to a trickle. Treeline claimed what had once been bank, then bed. But the trickle meant business, and cut new, deep banks close to the source and running by the pond, and even reclaimed four feet of bed at its widest point in the woods, where it had to find an entirely new, more circuitous course to the culverts. Regaining breadth even as it cuts ever deeper into the world, despite the school redesigning the ponds to curtail erosion.

*

Creek nonsense concludes next post! My youngest brother is in town and I want to kill virtual monsters and talk shit with him.


--JL

#144

What is up, the square root of twelve! A special and super cool number, for a variety of interesting reasons. I shall have to post steadily for another sixty or seventy years to get to the next square. We shall see. It is not a predictable reality.

*

My younger brothers and I used to strike out down the creek on mapping expeditions. As the oldest, I have always allowed my brothers what I thought was a normal but have found through comparison an extraordinary amount of license and autonomy while we spent time together and in cohabitational praxis. Basically, I did not act as a tyrant over them nor aggressively curb their behavior through punitive terror or emotional coercion, but treated them as equals under my care and protection, with rights and privileges no different than my own. I'm not saying I am a great brother, or that this made life easy or free of violent disagreement, but they are both smarter, more successful, and way less fucked up than I am, and when my brothers and I cooperate, it is as one three-headed organism.

The oldest of a brood can sometimes fill the role of icebreaker, nautically speaking. In gaming parlance, the tank. Militarily, the tip of the spear.

So really we would just go for walks and use our imaginations together, exploring and interpreting the natural world conveniently available to us, usually using the creek as a funnel for our spirits. We would join its flow into the woods, which allowed us to transform as we left the world behind.

Small woods. Small creek. But for us, an entire continent, laced with otherworldly fevers, and sometimes unspeakable terrors. There's a German word for it. 

*

When my parents and my youngest brother were living in a different country for a spell and my other brother was away at college, my first long-term ex and I moved into the house. We made a horrible mess of it and I disintegrated into level 9 alcoholism. I was getting ready to hit level 10 when I got arrested, so I didn't, but I did not stop making huge mistakes, nor was it the last time I would start drinking and eventually lose control of it.

She and I would leave the house to smoke, which is one of the kinder things you can say about how we treated the place. Cohabitational praxis indeed; we were disgusting shitty trashbabies, and it was still better than how we had treated the apartment we had lived in predating this period. I can't imagine who I would be without this woman, respect and honor her to that high degree you reserve for the cream, there is no one like her in the world and she is a down girl and the real business, but we were exceptionally bad together.

Awful. Nightmare shit.

We smoked cigarettes on the back deck more than we should have, especially in the dead of winter, but optimally we'd go down to the wooden platforms by the creek.

*

More about the creek...tomorrow! Hope you're digging this creek malarkey. Have a wonderful day.


--JL

#143

About a hundred yards to the immediate left of the back deck of our house, which is a condominium and therefore a big long building with other houses inside it and the deck is sandwiched between two other decks, the land drops a little and there lies the source of a creek. I have smoked a lot of cigarettes by this body of water. It springs up just past the border of the neighborhood on city land, which is wooded and separates us and the private school we share our main neighborhood road with from the next condo complex over, and marks the border of the private school's lands not directly facing us.

Some years ago the school dug out a pond on its side of the big field behind my house. The creek borders this field and strikes out into some woods further in that direction, before the highway cuts them off. The school buildings are on a rise beyond the field, their tall, square, white-tiled theater building a constant part of looking out the window. I used to catch a bus out at the front of that school, so it could take me to my school.

I thought it was a pretty arrogant thing to do, and it looked shitty for a long time, but they knew their business. A proper ecosystem now, in it and around it, native flora, flourishing algae, a colony of water rats, a relationship with the creek flow, all good stuff. They built wooden walkways out on their side of the creek and a big observation deck overlooking the pond and a little amphitheater for outdoor classes.

Anyway the morning sun was at a great angle and a couple of Canada geese were bathing, dipping their heads and jerking them back out like rearing snakes to water their backs and shaking it all back off with those great shivering wave-vibrations waterfowl employ so magnificently. Because of the bright gold light behind them, glimmering on the surface and making shining crystal out of every flying drop, they looked spectacular doing this, and the browns off-whites of their plumage shone tawny and warm, leaping out against the black, their white cheek-patches flaring.

Those birds suck to live with, but they have their moments, it must be said.

*

Also a couple of days ago I watched a water rat lazily chase a slightly nervous mallard around in the water for a couple of minutes. At least one of them was having fun.

*

The post that is actually about the creek is tomorrow's post. 

--JL

#142

"Dude, I heard you been reading in the office. You gotta cut that out. Can't have you doing that."

"Joe, man, if ___ comes to me again with a book of yours he found under the damn counter, this is gonna stop being funny to me, dude. I'm serious."

"You cannot read behind the counter, Joseph. What if customer come in? Plus you sitting down, people look inside, people not know we open. They not come in. You cannot do that."

"That is not a classroom text, mister Lidd. Put it away. I am tired of having to tell you."

"Is that a book? I am teaching. Give that to me immediately and see me after class."

"No reading in class. See me after."

"No, Joseph, you cannot stay in the classroom and read during recess. That is outside time, okay? Don't you want to play with your friends?"

*

Very, very boring stuff.

*

Could type for hours, quoting the ways I have been yelled at or criticized for reading at the table. 

Some stuff you just absolutely cannot for the life of you be obedient about, not even for your own mother. I would forget. After having had my ear off about it for the ten hundredth time. Literally forget. And when she said not to, it's like, I could hear her, remember that this was something I had been told a thousand times ten times over, and understand that it was serious, but I just cannot process that command. It is not a real part of the physical universe as far as my brain is concerned, so it was a war I was bound to win in attrition, since obeying a compulsion does not register as effort and defiance is immutable when protecting basal functions. Never did I say to myself "hell with mom and her feelings, I'm gonna bring this book to the table just to rub it right in her face". Rarely would I even think of anything at all. I would bring the book I was reading to the table because I was reading the book. I would grab a book to read at the table because I want to read while at table, a drive wholly undiluted by experience and untouched by any consideration or premeditation. Barely a conscious process. Nine meals out of ten, I have a book at the table. That's just how it is. She gave it up with reasonably good grace, after more than fourteen years of campaigning.

*

I read books in restaurants (though the ratio is three meals out of five), in lines, on buses and planes. Alleyways behind the restaurants where I have worked are a favorite, as is while standing up smoking a cigarette. I read The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis on a walk home, years ago. When I went to bars, I read books there. At sporting events, weddings, graduations, assemblies; on camping trips and other vacations; figured out places to hide during recess; and there is a list longer than I am tall of random places I have had to wait and happened to have a book or two on my person, plus another longer than my arm of planned waits I was ready for and places I have had to wait at on a regular basis and was thus usually equipped, such as bus stops, or stairways, or creaky old bleachers at the edge of a scrubby, cleat-torn field.

*

Life is fucking hilarious. What a dweeb. Also I have been a real jerk to my mother in this lifetime. Very poor form. 

--JL

#141

Today marks the first truly beautiful day of Spring around here. No doubt there is still horrid and antagonizing weather to come; wet snow, frozen mud, skinning winds. This day, though. Cloudless, sky so blue it striates at the edges of vision, leaps at you out of the corner of your eye, and overwhelms any direct gaze. Perfect comfort in a leather jacket, open over a t-shirt.

*

What a complete paragraph, eh? Totally did all of my jobs today. I am going to go back outside.


--JL

p.s. haha, not just a leather jacket, which is black! I wear black from shoulders to toes most days, except for colorful stripy socks, because I am an insufferable sadboy--except for my colorful stripy socks. The socks represent my joi de vivre. The black represents that you probably don't want to talk to me because I am weird or dangerous or both. Apparently. Personally, I am just honoring Ian Malcolm (fictional), Johnny Cash (he's got a song about it, it's corny as hell but real as fuck so here I am, wearing lots of black), and the Specter of Death. Also I like to keep things pretty simple.

#140

Everybody wants recognition for their talents and ideas, which is perfectly natural and healthy. Seems like most people want a lot more recognition than they are due, though. Most people that end up as rulers of any description have a bad case of it. Basically a lot of demands for recognition are very premature, even if they are met. Actually it is worse when they are met.

Terrible as it is to not be seen for who you really are, to have your many fine qualities go underutilized and even squelched by those who could use them, it is worse to have your mediocrity championed and to reap adulation for simply having better-than-average teeth or excellent deception.

Harder, much less likely to be of any material use, and kind of embarrassing as it may be, it is better to stick to your guns and work on what you know you were made for deep down. To not morph into what people want to see, but to grow into what you are.

* 

In order to meet the expectations of a culture that capitalizes and enshrines the path of least resistance in all things, we become greaseballs eternally slip-rolling and wetly bouncing further from dignity and autonomy, committing to nothing except the performance that gets us the most positive reinforcement on social media and the most capital for the least expenditure. 

Those last two things are deeply intertwined. 

*

Not that I'm not into it. If you can make money off of eyeballs, you absolutely should, and if making your internet avatar dance and shriek to the tune of chaotic decay makes you a buck and gives you a kick, who am I to judge? Be a king or queen of whatever scene. Monetize your identity as you politicize your body. Be a thinkfluencer or independent "journalist". Cacophonize synergistically. Get into imaginary real estate. Buy domain names by the dozen and remember the Parable of the Sower. Troll for a disinfo farm and if you're lucky it'll break legit. Who gives a fuck.

As I said, it is natural and healthy to want to be seen. 

Gotta eat. 

*

It's not that it's not smart or adaptive, because it is, and it's not that it's not moral, because that is outside the question and a fake anyway. 

The problem is in gaming the world, which is interesting and tantalizing and fun, but attaching this kind of meta to history comes at something of a cost to our ability to actually play. When you have locked yourself into a game's language in order to manipulate it, you give up your ability to be creative outside of its constraints. The problem, then, is not our ability to change the world, but our ability to imagine it and how to live in it, becoming the people that we want to be.


--JL

#139

Art is all about being at the right place at the right time. There is no way to be in the wrong place at the right time, or the right place at the wrong time, and being at the wrong place at the wrong time is only a matter of perspective; from a broad and intelligent one, there are no wrong places or wrong times.

Every second of existence is loaded with artistic potential. It's how one exploits it that matters. Manipulating the significance of existence. The rest is just medium, aesthetic, and practice. Planning, in some instances. Some tactical elements.

*

People have said that I am tactless. People have also called me very diplomatic. What I am is flexible; art is also coming to know and become proficient in the use of the best tool for every task.

*

Speaking of tactility, I notice that the surfacing of dream-memory is always accompanied by a very particular feeling in the body cavity. Sometimes high in the breast, sometimes behind the diaphragm, sometimes as low as the bowels, always coupled with heavy effervescence inside my head, coming in thick, potent surges as the memories rise to the surface. A battery of queer physical sensations, little balloons blowing up in my entrails, my heart dipped in a stinging, cooling ointment, weightless spine and hipbones. Sometimes the images and effects are so intense I am liable to trail off mid-sentence or stop what I am doing and remain completely still as I am assailed, assaulted even, by my dreams.


--JL

#138

One nice farce is watching the journalistic edifice lumbering in the far after-wake of the ships whose prows churn the edge of culture, misinterpreting and misrepresenting what their trawlers haul out of the water. Slicing off the heads and fins, macerating the flesh, sticking it into a can, and saying that the can is the heart of the matter, that the can is the thing that was swimming.

I call it the unweirding of the fishes. Necessary for stability, I guess? Simplifies the history books. 

*

Of course, I can be as easily misled as anyone. There's always more webs of delusion to disentangle; no one writes or reads out of total understanding and perfect clarity. These things do not exist.

*

Culture! A total fabrication.


--JL

#137

Smashing the State is way fashionable right now, not just for anarchists but for youthful grandparents and kindergarten teachers, only not the way that doesn't work. Not a job for physical hammers. A different way that does not work but is deceptively disorienting for everyone is simply using the internet, just firing it up and taking it in through the eyes.

Today, nearly one-fifth of the way through this bold new century, we apply corrosive meta-substances to the State by way of chatter and static. This ensures that nothing people want to destroy will melt away so fast that something else can't fill the niche, including blind faith and entrenched institutional powers.

See, hammers aren't just for taking stuff apart. Their collective impact is also known for building stuff up, for making certain metals under certain conditions much harder than they were in the first place.

In short, if you feel like a virus--a badass agent of chaos who jacks back into the Matrix just to be a hero-terrorist--you are probably a vaccination. 

Everything you think you're outsmarting and vanquishing and killing, laughing at you as it fucks you for pleasure and profit and grows stronger off your efforts.

*

When people say "this is why we can't have nice things" they mean that human nature fucks up our chances for living a ghastly, sterile unreality. "Nice things" means "everything exactly how I want it".

I, for one, am glad that everything is fucked. I do not want nice things.

*

No accretion of balanced equations creates the conditions for a balanced system. Irrational equations are a fundamental part of reality and it is their imbalance which creates the conditions for the relatively stable "band" of complex algorithms which we call life. 

Everybody has to deal with shit that they don't like.

--JL

#136

Been a rough season out here. One of those times in life where it takes everything you got just to point yourself in the right direction. Clinging to the rails so hard your knuckles split, vibrating at high frequency.

Trying to have a sense of humor about stuff. If you have a few laughs most days, the static dies down a little bit. Helps the bandwidth.

*

Kind of a killjoy thing to say--it's not a good idea to let your sense of humor get away with you. Thing is, that way lies madness and regret, and potentially doom. I enjoy joking around a great deal and I don't have a lot of scruples in that regard. Laughter can be fucked up and deadly as well as medicinal, though. Probably worth being cognizant of that. 

*

Whatever you need to get by though, of course. Gotta try to survive, and sometimes what the body needs to live is a touch of death. Staying sane means letting yourself go a little crazy. Any pun in a storm. 


--JL

#135

One awesome and super fun thing about human beings is how everything is definitely somebody's fault, and people have absolutely no ulterior motives or glaring biases when they assign blame. This incredible ability has truly allowed us to make sense of each other, and the world.

*

Without that lightest dusting of sarcasm, now. Honestly. Cannot understand why people take tragedies as immediate opportunities to try to be right.

Fuck all of you people. You rubbernecking goblins that drink pain and spit poison. Fuck you.

*

Hey, maybe if you accomplish a truly solid execution of being right, bad things will stop happening forever! Just keep being right all the time, hero. You are a fucking genius and you will save this ailing planet with style, and saved is how it will stay.

*

No, but fuck you.


--JL

#134

Something special about yesterday's post number that I neglected to mention is that one plus three plus three is seven, which is great, also that 133 is very visually pleasing in itself, a shapely and very soothing number. Saying one hundred and thirty three out loud provides an excellent cadence. Could be used in place of a mantra.

*

There is a huge, ruinous willow tree near my house. When my family first moved into the neighborhood it was hale and hulking out of its boundaries; more alive, huger, more treeish than reality could allow for, but you could see it almost, how there was more willow than tree. Living sigil. First and strongest among kings of willows.

Disease ripped through it and it has lost more than half of itself. Nearly all of its old crown, two boles, and a good portion of the main trunk rotted and sloughed off, came down in hard weather, withered away to fine brown dust. A tree whose leaves and pendulous branches were once so thick and numerous they created an elongated curtain dome thirty feet in diameter to hide under, hands parting branches for three seconds before you could enter the sanctuary, now sports leafage on one side only, from a meager set of stunted branches.

What limbs remain are full of woodpecker holes, many enlarged by starlings, scarred by the ravages of the illness that nearly destroyed it, and give the tree the impression of a stagger, as the remaining limb system was once but one of four mighty tops.

I've thought the tree was going to die for sure this time at least fifteen times. No one bothers about it. There has been no treatment or care. It has fought for its life alone and unaided and still it puts out flowers every spring, still it reaches up into the air. Brutalized, shrunk, weakened, still it breathes and sinks its roots and reaches toward the sky, straining for its life.


--JL

#133

Postscript for yesterday: basically I think we have an endemic cultural resentment towards the times that we live in and the centuries that brought us here, and suffer from a combination of mass resignation and mass olfactory revolt, which makes us useless, embattled, neurotic, desperate for absolution we don't believe is real, chronically ill, constantly sorry for ourselves, and either insufferable to each other or lost in another. 

What we need around here is amor fati, and to strengthen our fucking stomachs. That is all. We are each and every one of us lucky to be alive and lucky to be facing the challenges that we are facing. We are lucky to have the opportunity to be the smartest, strongest individuals that have ever lived free and we are lucky to have such great and terrible psychic and material obstacles to overcome. We are lucky to have problems of this complexity and breadth to tackle, lucky to have to deal with such a cacophony of ideas, lucky to have skin in this game. It is a blessed fate. 

Die trying.

*

As for me and my time these days, I've just been smoking all the cigarettes I can fit into my craw. Disgusting myself in general. Living at least thirty percent of each waking hour in the past, reflecting on the wherefores, flows, dynamics, and details of how I have fucked up. Working hard.

Been raising some strong Pokémon. There is always deep satisfaction in this pastime. Also the chiptunes and sprites of Blue Version take me back to the past in a different, much more pleasing way.

*

It's okay to be having a bad time. Lucky to have that, too, frankly.


--JL

#132

Living with your hand open is a tough and pointless gig. I'm suspicious of the notion of true karmic balance; when I think of balance in universal terms I do not think of perfection but a raging chaos whose ever-churning median is roughly stable and subject to collapse. So I do not believe that everything that goes around comes back around the same, I do not believe that you get what you give, I do not think that "good" deeds "outweigh" "bad" deeds (context and valuation, muddied waters). Those equations are part of the mathematics and sometimes things happen that way. 

However, guarantees are fake. There are no guarantees in reality. No givens. 

Furthermore acting generously or being kind because you believe that you are certain of returns is insufficient. That betrays a readiness to oversimplify things. I have never believed that action which is materially beneficial undertaken for reasons based at root in self-interest or greed or pure posturing in order to be perceived a certain way as ethically valid. It's fine, of course. Not going to cry foul on philanthropy or charity merely because it is selfish. Hollow and venal action can have positive results. 

I care more about motive because I care more about meaningful action. It seems gauche these days to be mindful of authenticity or even think that it is real, but there you have it. It also seems naive and stupid to suggest living an open-hearted life of positive sacrifice in the age of internet, and I get that. It is fucking rough out there and the current religion is the aggressive acquisition of securities and immortality.

But man, there is no use pretending that going through the motions is enough. If you are going to be generous, it can't be about skimming off the rounding errors. You have to be idiotic about it and let go of the security which allows you to be in a position to give without feeling. Everything you give needs to have weight to it because it ought to cost you something to let it go and you ought to be glad in the paying of the price, glad because you're strong enough to take it and it glad because the giving is enough and you don't have to give a thought to getting anything back.

Let everything drop from your hands. No hiding things in your fist. Open. Everything you own including your life is only borrowed; what the hell could it matter to hang on to it like that, clinging and grasping? Not to say that your things are somebody else's or that anyone can have whatever they want, but that what you own does not own you, that the pay not be more value than the work. 

We are all going to die and maybe it would be cool if on the way we treated each other like human beings instead of capital, if we had the courage to let ourselves be seen for who we are and the courage to see others as themselves, that all we owe each other is everything and nothing. Yeah, it's impossible to be a human being on internet, it's impossible to escape performance, everything is tainted, yeah, yeah. 

Generosity of spirit and a commitment to an open heart are more essential than ever now that they have been relegated to crude simplemindedness. Just gotta do it anyway, best you can, every opportunity you can catch, and fuck 'em off when they shame you. 

Life is for giving as many gifts as possible, for becoming a great and skilled gift-giver. That there may be an oversimplification; but if so, one I can get behind.


--JL

#131

Pretty good number today. Robust little weirdo, very nice square to it. 17, 161. Now that is an excellent number.

*

Was yesterday a rad day? Doesn't matter. Today ain't over and tomorrow is another day. Rad it up, rad it up, let the rad grow all around you till you cannot move for radness.

Life is very difficult to get through.

*

Other texts beckon; that's the best relief I know. Let's all spit the blood into the bucket, roll out our necks and get back to the middle. Not beat down yet.


--JL

#130

Basically how I feel about this particular moment in political history is that I am less troubled by the material actions of national officials than I am by their affect and their current entanglement with the public through the medium of online society; the people who call themselves our leaders are constantly up in our faces. This is because I am essentially less concerned with the consequence of policy--which, to simplify, is essentially consistent (princes be princes, and princes gonna prince, and all empires fall)--than with the behavior and rhetoric of policymakers and enforcers, which has a powerful mass psychological effect. The psychosocial condition of human beings is of more concern to me, and I think it's in a lot more danger than any political institution.

You might argue that I am lending undue credence to the notion that institutions are firm, but it is more that I consider the consequences of their disintegration in applied terms--increased public suffering in the short term--completely certain and inevitable, and so far something always springs up in place of what fell. Ecologies behave like ecologies. My interest lies in how people deal with these chaotic changes, whether they can be healthy and reasonable about it or allow themselves to be disrupted and destroyed.

Naturally this has a lot to do with the institutions that are available to them, or whose interest lies in their tractability, if nothing else.

But what do they feel? What do they come up with in order to survive and make sense of the world? What art do they make, what do they chatter about, who are they listening to?

The answers are usually horrifying, but never uninteresting, and sometimes life-affirming and beautiful beyond description. 

*

Alright, no, sometimes I find people very boring. They like to listen to idiots and con artists and they love to blather about inanities beneath the purview of basic brain function, other people's business, made-up problems, advertising, and bad sex.

I mean, who doesn't like inanity and sex, though. So punk rock. So Dada. 

*

It is a very beautiful day, and I cannot wait for my walk to work. Very excited to work my shift. March is warming up and turning sunny and we are gonna do this thing fucking alright, folks. 

Have a rad day. Rad day, everybody. Get the paperwork in order and clear the launch pad. Let's do it.


--JL

#129

How we keep going is all the miraculous proof that I need. Serious talk.

That we as a species have not instigated total nuclear annihilation--that we did not blow ourselves to perdition the minute that was an option--on top of each individual shouldering their trauma and exhaustion and the innumerable burdens of existence and stepping forward to fight the battle that is life is so overwhelmingly outrageously laughably against the odds, even for one day, that it is mathematically a miracle.

Mathematics themselves count as a miracle too, though. 

*

Drew three pictures last night. Did what I said I would do. 

The miracles we make ourselves are valid, too. To approach blankness and fill it with yourself--the performance of miracles. Everyone has this within them; even a creature like Charles Manson can make art that earns its name. That is a miracle, like it or not.

Nobody said miracles are always good things however you frame them, or that they're ever simple.

Universe doesn't have to be good to be miraculous. 

*

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once said that he believed increasingly in spite of, and not because of, the miracles. I haven't read his books yet, just about him, some quotes, very superficial. Think about what I've seen quite a lot, though. Getting ready. Reading is a process I take seriously; my priorities and decisions may seem violently changeable and wildly chaotic, but this is misleading. I set myself a program, through which I allow a rich seam of chaos to run, so that I never stagnate, and to which time is subordinate, not determinate. Waiting for fruits to ripen while I ride the wind and account for what it brings me. 

Discipline is not the same as control.

*

Anyhow, I am proud of everybody reading this for having survived to make it this far.

Fucking life! That shit is killing us, amirite?

*

Today I cooked some bomb scrambled eggs. Those fuckers got treated correctly every step of the way. 

Let me tell you something: eggs are a miracle. Think about an egg for a minute. Remember that an egg is how you got your start, and that when you eat eggs you are eating giant versions of the cell that you once were.

Stirred up some big cells in a hot pan and ate 'em right up. Yum yum! Man, they were decent. I honored their sacrifice to the best of my ability.


--JL

#128

Experienced reading Patrick Kyle's short comics through the medium of the short comics of Patrick Kyle in Everything Disappeared: Short Comics by Patrick Kyle, which contains the short comics of Patrick Kyle.

These are some of the best god damn comics I have ever had the fortune and pleasure to run my eyes across. This motherfucker is a supergenius. The short comics of Patrick Kyle stand among equals on that narrow platform which makes up the highest pinnacle of humankind's cultural achievements. Rarely have I experienced such wonder and pleasure, and never in my life have I laughed out loud on a city bus.

For real, ridiculously Quality. I was lent these comics by a coworker and as soon as I finish this post I am going to order my own copy. Dunno what I can lend back that will even this situation out. This is one of my favorite feelings and favorite challenges. 

Patrick fucking Kyle. This person has achieved something uncommon.

*

Also I ate a sandwich today. Let me tell you about this motherfucking sandwich.

This sandwich stepped up to home plate and sliced a thousand-mile-an-hour pitch in half with a sword. This sandwich punched the other boxer's head clean off like a dandelion. This sandwich dove into the pool with such force and technical prowess that in one clean three-second glide it laid its fingers on the far wall. 

Dogg, this sandwich punished. This was one of the sandwiches worth the suffering that staying alive has put you through and makes your cells heal a little as your soul resonates one clear pure note of honest and uncomplicated sacred pleasure.

Rustic Italian with delicious and flawlessly executed chicken salad (clean local farm chicken and house-made mayo) minced fine, roasted red pepper spread, two big exactly correct crunch and texture peppered strips of Arkansas bacon, and a mess of delicious thin-sliced spicy tang pickles, toasted to the precise point in butter; bread seared and delicate to hold, red peppers married into chicken salad warmed just barely to dripping.

Holy jumping saints in heaven. That sandwich was confirmation of value itself. That was God saying "Hey baby, look, I'm here. I'm right here with you. And I love you more than I can say, so here is a sandwich. Bite into it. I made it just for you."

Daily bread, man. I'm almost crying over here.

*

By no means all the blessings that today has placed into my basket, but frankly, much more and I'd just be chattering about how wonderful my life is. While it certainly is that, it's best to keep it simple and not get all high on your luck, so it shall suffice to say that I was gifted more wonderful food and the company of an old friend.

Some days just roll straight twenties. Turn up sevens every hour on the hour. Days you gotta grow your thankfulness just to keep up. 

*

Haven't drawn a picture in over a year! What the hell! This was once inconceivable to me. Have I mentioned this? Well I still haven't done it, but let me stand forsworn if that doesn't change right now, today, this instant.

After I, uh...eat another meal. 


Peace, peace, a thousand time peace plus one strong and firm out, yo.

--JL

#127

As a corollary to what I was talking about last time, I love objectionable, surreal, and non-improving works of art. White Ninja comics from back in the day are a great example, along with my abiding love of Charles Bukowski; not ashamed of reading and loving the dead and buried webcomic Hate Song, my approval of the monsters that created and the actual crime that is Wonder Showzen, so forth. Being away from the computer for a few days has gifted me for free with the single-panel wizardry of Sucko and Fucko. Absolutely hilarious. Don't know what I did to deserve this but I'm going to put a check in the "doing something correctly" column. Not sure know how long this creator can keep this up but it is not a waste of time.

Figure you'll know whether you want to explore it just from the name. I find it positively delightful, and the eight-to-thirteen-year-old that still lives in my head is howling with pure and total joy. Dildo jokes, pumpkinfucking, absolute nonsense, subtle and outrageously not subtle satirical edges. The only thing funnier to me than a naked man screaming at another man to look at his bared, stiff cock is dogfucking.

Dogfucking is the funniest thing in the world to me.

Yeah, yeah, judge it up. I'll stay laffin'.

*

Being away from the computer is an excellent thing. As I have stated, and it cannot be restated enough times, I detest computers, the internet, and everything that computers and the internet mean for society and the human animal; these are bad things, bad, unequivocally bad like virulent plagues and television commercials. However, I love comics, the unfettered dissemination of even the most completely lunatic and vile ideas (including, of course, my own), and raw data even more. Praise internet!

Also, I love you, dear reader. You. And here you are, on the internet! Wholly classin' the place up. Look at you! Keep on rockin'.

If you're not interested in the garbage I've been praising and promoting, perhaps one of these remarkable offerings will be more your speed, far from the gutter where I happily roister and feed. Haven't read each one but what I have sampled is exquisite, and all the art is stunning. I mean just look at it.

*

Took a break from J.M. Roberts' A History of Europe (fricking magnificent, makes me want to secure at least ten more history books and has already made me buy three) to read Fire and Blood, by G.R.R. Martin. So fucking good. I've read the Song of Ice and Fire books seven times, the stories in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms perhaps two to five times depending on the tale, and A World of Ice and Fire three times because I am not a well man.

As evidence, I present that I already want to read Fire and Blood a second time. Like, right now. I read it just this weekend. 

Staring it at it hungrily, right now, even as I type, seriously considering it. 

*

Dildo jokes, pumpkinfucking, and fantasy history. Man, life is hilarious!


--JL

#126

Added some more links to webcomics, the best webcomics. I thought carefully about adding more to the best webcomic. The  best comic is of course Achewood, which is probably over, the second is Buttercup Festival, which is updating again after six years and has been the perfect thing since it started up way back in the early days of webcomic explosion and continued to be through all its revolutions and going on hiatus. The third is the bravest, funniest, smartest, most intense and well-executed piece of fantasy being written today and some of the best art ever produced by human hands. Just my opinion, but if you think I'm full of shit, I expect you have not read it. And if you have, and disagree, please tell me who is making something better than that because I want to read it very much.

Though should you point me to something I've already read, or am already reading, be warned that I will forever consider you simply addled. Ashley Cope is the foremost living creator of fantasy since the passing of Ursula K. LeGuin. Full stop, no further service on this line.

*

Should you present me with some argument that this cannot be so due to some violence the artist has perpetrated in life or work, be assured that sorry though it makes me, it is too late for me; I am one of those people that believes the work has a life and value outside of its creator and will not change my position based on hearing that an author did not lead the blameless life of a saint. I am not a saint either. And, sadly, you shall never convince me by word or deed that you are a saint, no matter how piously you assure me or how assiduously you forward that argument by calling the universe broken on the basis that it does not meet your personal criteria. 

More likely to think of you as a censor and a person with a tendency to abuse other people. Not impressed by those qualities, though I concede they do not make you the devil. I know you're probably just trying to be a good person. That is what makes you dangerous, and forgivable.

See? We all draw our lines in different places. All sorts of different ways of interpreting things.

*

Think I'm wrong? Good. Keep asking questions. Fight me in your mind. I don't care who's wrong or right because those are almost always fake applications of narrow band of reasoning and ultimately it is almost impossible for me to hurt you by loving something that I read or see and you can't hurt me by hating the same thing. 

I care only that we are both perceiving art and thinking. 


--JL