#167

Saw a headline tweet that began with "synthetic speech programs that use facial tracking to..." and I scrolled right the fuck down because I don't care which way that sentence ends.

At this point I don't want to be forewarned about any of this shit. Confront me with its grim realization at the supermarket checkout line. Make me take it in stride. Force me into a state of hyperadaptivity.

*

I want to wake up with the nanobots already in me.

*

In an excellent mood, feeling quite all right, just swimming on down the stream. It rained some yesterday and the creek by my house is running real deep and quick, flashing glass and silver in its bed. 

Really appreciating the flow of water in my life lately. Blessings and blessings and blessings.


--JL

#166

Yo, as of now, this ole blogomatic has 77 posts for this year, 88 posts for last year, and the tworter account has tweeted 222 tweets. This delicate and incredible situation will cease to be as soon as I smash the "publish" button on this, the one hundred and sixty-sixth post.

Life is so fucking rad. Why are numbers so cool? People say fuck math, I have said it myself, but like, I wanna fuck math.

*

You know. Do it.

*

One plus one equals two. This is the third-most basic framework for reproduction and also pornography, preceded by one plus one equals (x) ones, itself preceded by one divided by half. 

Yup, 1(0.5)=2 and that right there is where fucking begins. The math that supports that moment in possibility is more complicated and murky, but still hot, probably.

Bet it feels disgustingly good to engage mitosis, ugh. Just...splitting. Mm.

*

Haha okay I'm done being gross for today.   

*

Well, on paper, anyway.

*

Let's see. Read Fear and Trembling by SK and got most of the way through The Sickness Unto Death (both translated by Walter Lowrie), then decided to break it up a little with Roaming Foliage by Patrick Kyle and I should finish up Tezuka Osamu's Ayako before I go into work. Then back to Kierkegaard. Planning on reading his Philosophical Fragments (translated by David Swenson including commentary by Niels Thulstrup, translation revised and commentary translated by Howard V. Hong) and after that I'm thinking of rereading Being and Time by Martin Heidegger, but I've also been eyeing King Kong Theory by Virgine Depenthes, No Disrespect by Sister Souljah, The Death of Truth* by Michiko Kakutani, and frankly, I don't even know why I'm bothering to plan because I'm also feeling the pull of Hannah Arendt, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Stephen King, Ursula K. Le Guin, Manning Marable, Carl Jung, and William Shakespeare, plus a couple anthologies. Just to name a few.

Literally anything could happen, including none of the above. Chaos reigns!

*

Point is, I'm done with this, gonna go read.


--JL

*I complain about people saying shit like this, titling their books and articles with shit like this, but y'know, I always feel compelled to investigate the claim. I sneer at "the death of this and the death of that" but I'm always like "oh, whatup, you said what died? Tell me allll about what you mean by that." Probably I'm just chasing the dragon of how I felt when I read that God is dead. Nothing ever measures up even in the remotest sense. 

#165

Game of Thrones is in the process of happening for the last time in its form as a premium television program. Tonight a climactic battle takes place.

For real, my money is on everybody surviving. I expect no main character will die tonight. They will ride out this darkest hour only to die later this season.

While I'm dropping predictions, Cersei's about due for a monstrous stillbirth, also. I expect this to happen. I do not expect them to confront the audience with it in too extreme a fashion, but one can hope. Yet one cannot help but notice that typically, however, entertainers who dish out hypergore and ripe tits like they're going to become illegal soon are rarely willing to show even the successful birth of a healthy baby head-on.  

*

Leaf-clusters are growing larger, opening further, beginning to be their own leaves or form trios, starting to give the branches of all the trees and shrubs that fuzzy green screen when seen together in their clusters of angles and tangles from a slight distance. Flowers are open on most of the trees that bear them; magnolias all looking excellent this year, very strong. The musky, somewhat disturbing scent of the Callery pear trees is beginning to waft. Saw a little tree with russet leaves and delicate white slender-petaled flowers and little tree with acid-green leaves beginning to blush dark red and full round-petaled white flowers beginning to blush the lightest pink.

Gold light fell all over everything. A cool breeze blew gentle over and through, over and through. 

A chaotic universe. Truly beautiful.

*

It was a great day at work today! I laughed so much. It was so fun. I work with some truly fine people. Some lovely folks. 


--JL

#164

It may be that the darkest secrets we possess are unknown to us, that to even approach them in thought is to shy away. Sane people do not, after all, ride their horses off the edge of a cliff just to see what is at the bottom. 

Gravity will take you there nonetheless, if you let it. But what kind of person lets it? It seems to me that these secrets come to you, fall upon you from above or rip the ground from underneath you. The bottom of the cliff comes to get you. Your horse takes you over as you desperately yank at the reins of an extremity beyond self-preservation.

Perhaps those we call the insane are simply those who know the most secrets, and are not able to keep them. Seems to me what distinguishes those we call sane from the insane is merely secretiveness, what one knows to keep hidden.

*

Hm. Spooky shit. Kinda grim. 

To bring it back to ground a bit, apropos of nothing, every time I tell a secret I feel that I have done a crazy thing, and madness lies not far away, probably interested in my scent and thinking about a meal. I keep a lot of shit to myself and I still think I spill my guts way too much, in way too real a fashion. 

Some secrets can change everything. Picture a mountain range the size of the Alps shouldering out of the depths of the Pacific in one gargantuan violence, displacing lord knows how much water and disrupting lord knows what percentage of every current in the ocean, and creating an entire new ecosystem for plants and animals and people to fuck in and fight over. Some secrets are like that! And some secrets just explode like you never even imagined, the Yellowstone caldera going fully critical in the space of a second.

You never really know till the thing is said, you know? But to flip that coin has something of madness about it. I have a tricky relationship with reality as it is, and my temperament is precisely that which is curious enough to let gravity find a way to take me to the bottom. That kind of curiosity is certainly flirting with insanity, more so when mixed with another crazy thing I can't control, which is hope. 

*

Pretty good day, all told. Laughed a bunch, cooked some food, got two books (also seven yesterday), and took a jump with both feet. That might have been kind of a crazy thing to do, but after all, the hope is that at the bottom, the water is drinkable, that facing your darkest secrets is a trial one can master and when you climb out the other side of the canyon, you're looking at new territory, something huge and unsounded to explore.


--JL

#163

Oh wow, people don't believe in demons? People are fucking hilarious.

"Well, I don't believe in anything that isn't real! Fuck you, Joseph, you damn retrograde pill. I thought you liked science."

"Demons are just an excuse. That's a justification people made up for their own bad behavior or to explain away their weaknesses. Keep blaming your shit on demons, Joe, see where it gets ya."

Cool, so that's me cut down to size, and that will have learned me, and now I know better. 

*

People don't understand at all what is meant by the word demon, far less by what is meant by saying that something is demoniacal. Confusion about angels also abounds; listen. Demons are the comforting ones. They're just like us! Angels are terrifying, impenetrable aliens. Every angel carries a terrible swift sword. Mercy, justice, love--all wielding the hardest, sharpest objects in all creation.

But the point here is not qualification but existence and reality. So are demons real or not? 

Shit man, I dunno. But if you've never been fucked with by demons, it may be that they see no need for it.

So thoroughly do you already meet their needs.

Or maybe you were born with a kind of armor on, a cloak of invisibility, a heart so totally pure that it cannot be seen, let alone touched.

Perhaps what protects you is an indifference so complete, a self-narrowing so total, that you have actually become one, and everyone in your life is afflicted by you. Indifference is hella demonic, perhaps integral to the concept.

*

What I know about demons is that if you can see them and smell them, well, you might be crazy, or you might be beyond sanity, which is very different. I cannot. I do know that if I think of something, it is as real as anything else. Metaphors do not describe reality, they elucidate reality in relation to reality to reveal an unreal that is real. Angels and demons are metaphors, and metaphors are real. I know that everything is real in relation to the absolute because the absolute contains it, and thus the absolute contains all unreality in its suprareality.

Ghosts don't scare you because they aren't real and they don't scare you because they are real. You don't think of a tiger the way you think of a ghost. Tigers are real. They can really kill you, but you have to be near one and it has to actually happen. Not so with ghosts. What scares you is the unreality, the unrevealable, the not real which  has a real effect on you nonetheless. 

A ghost can kill you without being real, and it doesn't have to actually happen in order to happen.

*

Demons aren't real. They are just you, us, me. Sure. This is a fact. Nothing more than nightmares, which aren't real either. Just ideas, which aren't real, and never have any real effects on real reality. Just metaphors, which don't really exist, and don't affect real life. 

Glad to have that settled.

*

Look. I don't pretend to be anything other than an idiot. But if you don't think demons are real you are a concussed and tiny moron, which I'll just go ahead and say is very different from being an idiot. You can laugh at me, and people who are smarter than me can laugh along. You and Richard Dawkins and Neil deGrasse-Tyson can all touch dicks and crack some cold ones on some lawn chairs as you laugh at me struggling, my tiny brain shooting steam as it groans under the weight of such stone tablets, such ancient cruft, such superstitious nonsense, in this day and age.

Y'know, it'd be great if y'all were right. I remember believing there are no such things as demons, that the shadows on the cave wall are nothing more than shadows you can get away from. But out in the light? There's a lot more shadows than inside. 


--JL

clarifying postscript: Unreal affect has real effect. Unreal things are as affective and effective as real things because in fact there is no barrier at all between the unreal and the real. To be certain that something is unreal is murky at best. To be certain that the unreal thing does not exist is a hard misread. To be certain that only real things are real and only real things matter is nothing more than lucid, rational stupidity, a stupidity with its eyes closed, far more complete and embarrassing than ignorance. Certainty itself is a kind of petrification of thought.

Truly it is as though y'all motherfuckers really didn't read a page of Plato, really never looked at a word Socrates said. And far, far worse, by several orders of magnitude, forgot everything you ever knew as kids.

#162

Seared my right wrist down low and to the outside against the edge of a hot pan a while ago. Still open, peeling, occasionally suppurating scab in the center of it. Two days ago the corner of a hot tray pressed into my left bicep high up and to the inside. The worst part about taking an induction burn like that is the pressure aspect, where you get not just burnt but speed-cooked on the outside and deep down below, so that the burn has a deep ravine structure, inflammation from the lowest point pushing up increasingly dead flesh, itself inflamed. 

Also you can hear them very clearly, the fats in your skin and meat hissing as they burn away.

It is also bad when the top layer eventually sloughs off, leaving naked glistening unskin that cracks and twists as it dries and festers. 

Eventually, though, they'll both just be shadows on my skin. Reminders.

*

We are who we are because of what has happened to us and how we have dealt with it or not dealt with it. At each moment we are the single result of the accumulation of our time as a phenomenon, and the next  moment leaves that phenomenon behind, where it no longer exists and also stays with the phenomenon that is in the moment, this phenomenon which trails an ever-expanding tail of past forms of itself. 

The self is an equation constantly subject to new variables, whose result is accordingly in constant flux. An expanding sphere. 

So, you grow. Older. When the variables stop changing, that is death. 

*

When you're dead, the past is all there is (for the phenomenon which was itself in relation to the moment, not for its trail of selves, which tend to stick around to varying degrees and cause trouble). 

Not so when we are alive; however, I have this tendency to act as though this is so. I live as though the past loomed over the present with such power as to close it down entirely, to freeze me and bury me. I act as though the past has spoken in a voice of judgment and that the tale is told, the math is over, and there is nothing to add, and if there is more content, it is just a shitty appendix to a squandered story.

This way of interpreting the past and of letting it work upon me is a death-aspect, a demon.

How does one defeat this demon?

*

Well, I'll start like this: the past may be the future only two instants too young, but it is also the fucking past and however much power it may have over that future, the future it is not. Only the future is the future. The past cannot see or know anything about the future, only the moment which is becoming the future, the self in the moment of the equation having a result in one moment, only that has an apprehension of the future, as it is happening, and as it recedes into the past.

If you look back, you die. It isn't just that you lose Eurydice. You die. You missed the whole point and now you're dead.

They'd be justified in burying you with your head on backwards.

*

With demons, you don't riddle. You don't wrestle. You don't take up arms or charge or trick or gamble.

You turn away and you take the steps of faith. Forward. Into what, you know not. But away from this demon shaking fistfuls of your own ghosts at you, shoving its tongue into your ear night and day, singing skeletal, endlessly repeated dirges over the live music that's playing right now. 

*

I don't forget a lot of stuff in life. I forget to turn in pieces of homework, among other stuff that is expected of me and stuff I said I would do, but I don't forget life, the living part, the stuff that happened, what I saw, heard, tasted, felt. I forget names, I forget the exact placements in a linear geography of time, but I don't forget the prevailing light and the way the wind was blowing; I don't forget the words or the signs, even if I can't quote them verbatim. Nothing is perfect and every translation transforms. But my memory is insistent and insistently clear. The past is very real to me. Life has been fucked up and very beautiful, so bad and so wonderful I could tear myself apart trying to feel it all at once.

Memory has its uses. It's what makes us human. It's what makes the math work out to something that expands and climbs, rather than merely iterate. Remembering how I have acted, what I have said, what I have done, and attempting to exceed myself as I was in hopes of remembering myself one day as I had hoped to be--it is the past that we use to imagine ourselves into existence, the impetus we have to will our lives into a shape, the stone from which we push off in our endeavor. 

What does not work is trying to jump and hang on tight at the same time. In this bodily/psychic contest, hanging on always wins.

To be ever engaged in the act of pushing off the rock and onto the next movement, the next rock to push off of. That is how you fight the demon that has you clinging endlessly to the same stone.


--JL 

#161

Spring is a time of such soft delicacies springing up everywhere. All the newest, rawest things resurfacing the world. Trees dropping their tiny, brief buds, their work already done, as little white flowers start springing up in the deep uncut grass. Frogspawn in the still pools of the creek, small toads on the sidewalk at night. The big dying willow put forth more branches and blossoms than last year. New growth all the way around.

Is it really dying? Yes. Everything is. Even as it is born.

That is the great wonder and opportunity of this existence.

*

Taking an infinite multiverse as writ, the death of the universe is just the end of a symphony, one symphony among infinite symphonies. Every note ends, the piece runs its course, but the music is eternal.

*

One note sounds out, one voice singing one tone. It begins, and ends, and though there exists not a trace of its passing, it was; it sounded. Thus it sounds eternally, will always have sounded, and the truth of this endures beyond the end of all things.

Nothing needs to do anything to be. And to be is to possess universal significance, whether anyone knows it or it goes unnoticed, stays secret, exists only beneath text.


--JL

#160

What has been going around here? How have things been? Burning questions, questions of weight, to be handled with grace.

*

There is a dogshit situation all around our little corner of the neighborhood; my neighbors have a thick, listless Labrador and they let it out without a leash so it can squat wherever it pleases. No one seems able to do anything about this issue. All attendant and pertinent forces seem to have firmly flowed into the "act as though there is no problem" channels of influence.

My own force is certainly at home in this. I just skirt the area of effect when I go to smoke by the creek or walk the dog whose shits I diligently pick up, as per the social contract.

*

After about eight months of walking to and fro from work I have finally seen cause to cut down and try taking the bus a few times a week. Restless and unreliable sleep, combined with an increased workload and the steady wear of mixed opens, closes, and a weekly clopen, means that ten miles on top of a shift is pushing it too far.

Not smoking cigarettes would be doing myself a favor, also. Bracing for it.

Walked like three thousand miles from September to today. Probably okay to cut down a little bit.

*

Everything very big into blooming right now. So many baby leaf clusters and new flowers everywhere. Grass getting lush and vibrant. A special time.

*

This morning I took a short break from reading Kierkegaard to read Black Mass by Patrick Kyle. As excellent a thing made about punk as I ever hope to see.

*

Attempting to think more and overthink less, to coordinate my head and my heart into a harmony rather than competing solo acts. Trying to keep getting better at when to talk and when to shut up. Making efforts towards taking care of the people around me and balancing that with protecting myself.

Paying attention to these things reveals to me just how often I fail. So it goes. Shake self off, climb on horse.

You cut your fingers enough, you get extremely good at coaxing your flesh into knitting back together.

*

Things feel like they might be getting a little easier. Well, we will just see, won't we?


--JL

#159

Today has decidedly marked the end of early spring around here. Officially sprung. It is also Easter Sunday. I do not feel qualified to comment on Easter Sunday! It's a day to think about for sure. 

*

Also Passover. Also a huge deal. Big stories! Wow. Frankly, overwhelming. 

*

Worked pretty hard today. Gonna go lay down.


--JL

#158

You know, I like number one hundred and fifty-seven a lot. Couldn't think of anything about it in particular yesterday, but it's a cool number. It's just cool. I bet there's lots of reasons why, there always are, but I just feel like it is cool. A cool cat. 157.

*

Definitely one of those days where it's very hard to be alive. Very hard to have a body and be in it.

*

Well, what are ya gonna do.

Me, I write poems. Then I throw them in the garbage or consign them to flame or digitally destroy any evidence that they ever existed. Put one of my feet in front of the other foot, then put the second foot in front of the first foot.

Go on like that for a while.  

It is amazing that anything survives.


--JL

#157

These Derrida essays are fucking savory. They're the sort of thing I would have unhinged my jaw and swallowed in a single sitting when I was younger, comprehending but not fully understanding, before grabbing the next thing off the shelf. Devouring and devouring, never sleeping. I chew a little more now. Once I was a python that had eaten an elephant. Don't know what I am now, but the way I am receiving these essays make me feel like I might have digested something.

This makes me outrageously suspicious of myself. It is essential to never, never relax into feeling like you have anything figured out.

*

On a related note, I wished to clarify that my last statement in yesterday's post was not meant to be a a condemnation of existence. Not a moaning or a groaning. Simply a noting.

My feelings about the vortex are complicated, but overall, I would rather be here than not. Ecstasy > Agony, even at my most agonized and bereft. My feelings about the center are that it is a gift. The essays have been validating these feelings with every word and also the title of the collection*, which is why I picked it up in the first place. 

--JL

*The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida (Secrets of European Responsibility; Beyond:Giving for the Taking, Teaching and Learning to Give, Death; Whom to Give to (Knowing Not to Know); Tout autre est tout autre)

#156

Everything in life is just to help you get through it. You'll like how some stuff feels as it does this, and other stuff, you really won't. So you'll use some stuff and won't use the rest, avoid the rest if you can.

Eventually, this process comes to a halt. Won't have to get through anything anymore.

*

Because I got depression, I am very active in this clinging to flotsam. Books, games, jobs, relating with other people, smoking, it's all about fending off total dissolution. 

Sometimes you're sitting pretty on a raft in a calm lake. Sometimes you're clinging to a barrel as it races down a river. Sometimes it's a twisted piece of wreckage in a stormy ocean. Sometimes you are clinging to a dragon's back. Sometimes you don't have anything to hand and you just have to tread water, or fall through the air.

*

Getting thrown into existence isn't like being planted in anything solid or otherwise earthly. It's being thrown into a vortex, warped by incalculable forces as they drag you ever to the fixed and perfect center.


--JL

#155

Took a long walk. Nice day for it. Cold wind and hot sun, and what little clouds there were burned and blew out of the picture as the day wore on. Live smells starting to come out of the world. Lotta bird action.

Thought I'd go have a conversation with someone I haven't seen in a long time, but it didn't work out. Knew that might happen, would probably happen. Tried anyway. I know not to try and force these things. Tried anyway. Around the time I gave it up and walked away, the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris caught fire. Came home to footage of her burning, the spire collapsing.

Made sense.


--JL

#154

Had kind of a weird little breakdown on shift yesterday. My job is physically demanding and my schedule is not the most humane for me sleep-wise, on top of all the walking, and I worked an extra consecutive day this week because months ago I requested today and tomorrow off to go to Chicago for a specific reason. This I chose not to do. Wisely, for the schedule change destroyed me and if I had gone, it would have been taking my system past the red lines, on top of all the good personal reasons not to go. Buying the train tickets was a mistake made out of a desire to force the universe to comply with my selfishness in wishing to rectify past mistakes. Gotta catch these things if you can, master yourself before you do any damage.

They say not fixing a mistake is a second mistake. I consider most mistakes incomplete; trying to fix them usually finishes the job.

But yeah, I hit a kind of wall yesterday. It was embarrassing for me. For all the people around me might think to the contrary, because I go out of my way to act tireless and robustly sane, I am a basic regular human in a body with physical limits and a pretty weird headspace. The act is essential for everybody; it's a morale thing. Yesterday it broke down a little. I cooked well and sold food and did my job all the way, but the cracks in the armor showed and you know what, fuck it, so it fucking goes and fuck it all anyway. I deserve an ounce of fucking slack once or twice a fucking year. Can't believe I've put any energy into feeling bad about this.

Every day I take on psychic burdens and extra labor to make sure everyone around me feels safe and good and I'll be god damned if I let myself feel bad because my equipoise slipped some for a little bit one day.

*

Started reading some early essays of Derrida's today, which I haven't checked out before. Made me want to revisit Kierkegaard. So it begins.

Good. I need to lose myself in the hard shit.


--JL

#153

It may be that the great delusion of our time is grandeur, even though what almost anybody talks about is insignificance. The death of this and the death of that*. The most advanced and self-aware accretion of individuals who ever lived getting off on how powerless they are, as though they were not indispensable and active participants in the transformation of the planet.

*

Oh, but Joseph, we are killing the planet! Everything is tits-up and it's all our fault! And the world wide web turned out to be a huge mistake! We need to go back to simpler times!

Let me stop you there, hypothetical. You're not wrong, but the very fact that you're capable of grasping this situation is itself revolutionary and astonishing. The fact that you can feel psychologically responsible for the situation is also phenomenal. You represent a paradigm in human self-understanding, and that is reason enough to be optimistic.

Simple times ain't comin back, though. Nothing works that way.  

No doubt, it's a bad situation. Stuff got complicated and threatening fast, and it seems like it was better yesteryear. But it's just a simple evolutionary problem, and it is the same one as it has ever been: are we smarter than we are rapacious? Are we capable of having enough collective discipline to curb our collective excess? Do we have the guts and the brains to keep riding the edge of chaos? We are not going to stop destroying or consuming. The best we can do is create more than we kill.

If we're able to balance the shit that refuses to get right with the the ideals we can never quite achieve, we keep on going. If we can't we very likely go extinct, or undergo a total change in our ecosystem niche. And if it's just civilization that collapses, then it is literally no big deal. That happens all the fucking time, and while of course it seems like the end of the world when it's happening, it hasn't been yet. We are all the inheritors of the spoils of hundreds of dead empires.

Like I say, the stakes feeling higher than ever before doesn't change the fundamental problem. All we can to is try every day to keep the world going, just to see if it does, until we can't. No use wallowing in how futile it seems. Pathetic to pretend you're above it all. Just do what you can think best to do, every day. Push your thinking in that matter as far as it can go. Do what you can to follow through for real and materially.

*

Personally, being well-satisfied with reality, I am not optimistic. As I said, too many delusions of grandeur, regression fetishes, and post-nihilist death-fixations out here; I think most people would happily welcome the apocalypse just to say that they were right all along and that someone else was to blame, managing to still feel guilty over their complicity. I mean, what did you expect them to do, change their lives?

However, some people that are much smarter than me are optimistic; they trust their reasoning, they are hard at work, and there are a lot of them, so I am at least relaxed enough to enjoy watching it all happen, gut-wrenching as it can be. I hate seeing a sea turtle covered in plastic with a gut full of the stuff to boot as much as anyone.

Also if we haven't blown each other to final perdition yet, at this point I really think it'll be an accident if we do. Small comfort, but, not being an optimist, I can make do with very scant comforting. A cactus only needs a little rain.

--JL

*Irony never dies. It is a fractal.

#152

Nothing quite like pissing the bulk of the day away carving swathes of destruction through mobs courtesy of one of Blizzard's objets d'grind. Diablo III, in this instance. 

Fascinating, a whole company focused with streamlining every facet of every single thing to such a fine degree. Also the harvesting of broad composite in order to produce what can be thought of as a compact cube of everything else that has ever appeared in a given genre made somehow original without being altered.

Playing a Blizzard game is like endlessly turning over a highly polished piece of mirrored metal in your fingers, and having the part of your brain that is entranced by that fill most of your consciousness.

*

Also I walked the dog and fed it and did laundry. It was my day off.  


--JL

#151

Number one hundred and fifty-one is just as special as one hundred and fifty, for very similar reasons to the ones sketched in brief yesterday. 

*

I wonder if one could translate something like, say, a Socratic dialogue into a brief series of memes, and lose no overall textual payload. Memes might have sufficient explicative power to carry it off.

More accessible by far than something like a condensation or a "cliff's" "note".

*

Had the thought that the universe is just an incomprehensible equation working itself out.

We have managed to piece together so little of the math involved. Gonna have to evolve so hard just to understand more math.

*

Cool. Yet another robust and worthy post, ornately accomplishing nothing. I just pulled a band-aid off my forearm and tore off quite a bit of hair. Positively hilarious.


--JL

#150

Number one hundred and fifty is a sacred number, a titan: the number of the first generation of Pokémon, not counting Mew, which is weird, but canonical. It is strange and mind-bending to have Mewtwo come before Mew, the hybrid before the prime, but there is no way out of it. It's like how you are free to not exist, but not free to have not existed. Numbers and language and the seeming contradictions between what they describe and seeming reality and the truly real are just the rules of the game. 

Nothing can ever be truly real, but everything that is not real is contained within reality, is just as real as anything else. Unreal things are just as independent of how many people believe in them or what they believe about them as real things. Their reality, their having-been-in-the-world, is unaffected, despite relying on belief to have come into existence in the first place.

*

Reality has this tendency towards getting realer all the time. The realer it gets, the harder it is to believe in it.


--JL

#149

Been a strange, tense couple of weeks. One of those times in life where relations with every single person in your life are a little sandpapery at best, a season of snags in every instance, tiny violences intentional and accidental blooming everywhere along with the branches of the early trees. All the time a low insistent drone at the back of your skull, the unlocking of the season ratcheting everyone's intensity up, causing us to chainsmoke and make mistakes. 

All you can do is weather the storm, throw all the dead weight you can find overboard as you reframe what does and does not constitute dead weight under present conditions, and use whatever you can catch hold of to stay alive. Try not to make as many mistakes as you want to. 

Hold the center.

*

Personally I have always had a tricky relationship with early Spring; it can really fuck me up. I have made some really terrible, even fantastically terrible decisions at this time of year. 

Keeping it pretty steady this time around. Thankful for that. 


--JL 

#148

Just reread One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey. One of my favorite books of all time; used to collect different printings and editions of this book. Stole two copies of the same edition from my high school, had one with a weird movie cover, one with a cover by some French artist that I bequeathed to my younger brother, one or two others. Got rid of them over the years and stuck with my Penguin Classics Deluxe edition containing the introduction by Robert Faggin and the foreword by Chuck Palahniuk with the Joe Sacco cover, full of the author's evocative sketches. I like the cover okay and absolutely love Kesey's artwork right in with the text, but the foreword and intro are unbearable, albeit intelligent and useful. I mean they are fine but a part of me is cringing the entire time I read them.

Still one of the best bangers ever fucking written. I need to not go another year of my life without rereading this book. It has been a mistake to slack off. 

Now I am going to read Witches Abroad, by Terry Pratchett, because my buddy just keeps slinging his books at me, because I told them to throw him at me whenever, because Discworld books are simply incredible every time. Dude is smart as all hopping hades and an unbelievable condenser. An implication of his swings more dick than three whole regular books.

Finished A History of Europe, quite a ride. Really phenomenal work. During the process of absorption I leavened it with Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson, and Small Gods, by that selfsame Terry Pratchett we were discussing. Both of these books thoroughly rocked me. I now understand why people are surprised that I haven't read Snow Crash, and bug me so much about it when they find out I haven't. Well, now I have, and I get it, and am simply living a better life now that it's happened. Everybody wins.

Also read a lot of comics every day, per dietary standards. 

Peace, flickering candles. Stay lit.


--JL

#147

In number one hundred and forty seven, we have the excellent situation of a compound number composed of its own double. I really dig that kind of thing.

One of my favorite things in the whole wide world is adding 123,456,789 to 987,654,321 to get 11,111,111,110. Equally pleasing is the addition of 321,654,987 to 789,456,123 in order to create exactly the same result. That shit is the definition of sublime. There is no feeling like it.

Also? 123,456,789 plus 789,456,123 equals 912,912,912. How do you fucking like them apples? 321,654,987 plus 987,654,321 is 1,309,309,308. That last eight is what really makes the whole affair transcend perfection, the single digit--just the first whole number, ripped from the ones column and thrown into the millions.

No matter what happens in life, there's always math. Just doing a problem and seeing the result. The mind goes to a place.

I also like graphs a lot.


--JL