#172

Oh! Oh hey, blog. The blog I write, allegedly. Didn't see you there. Didn't see you there behind the tall, imposing cardboard cutout of a steaming cup of coffee, like a revenant from billboard concerning coffee from the middle nineteen-nineties.

Billboards aren't really about coffee anymore. They have transformed into glaring screens of swirling aggressively-colored and aesthetically sterile pontillisms, spewing the possessive white light that drains their content of any human warmth and shows only the mercenary rapine of trying to sell actual drive-up plastic surgery, as well as fifty other products, experiences, or notions (such as local wine, such as a safe bed free of parasites, such as a strip club near an airport, such as the services of a lawyer whose only drive seems to be to see you compensated beyond your wildest expectations [this is not a claim I have ever found very probable], such as the Word of Our Lord as it Relates to a Political Issue, such as an exceptional Mickey D's, such as the heroism involved in attaching yourself to the armed forces, such as the services of a powerful chiropractor*, such as a radio station you could listen to**) in an unresting loop, every hour of every year.

*

Not only has Album Week--fucking got-damned fricking Album Week 2019, worst decision of the month no question--put something of a damper on my workflow, my productivity overall has been a standstill due to life changes and emotional restructuring. Heavy work! Think of my spirit-body as a long and many-tiered bridge, with little construction gnomes all athwart it in their masses, busily shoring up the infrastructure and making plans to deal with new demands, with the fresh prognostics.

Each carries in their gnomy little hand a steaming cup of coffee.

*

On top of this, I had in fact written a high-effort post on the twelfth of this month--still a four-day lapse, one day longer than I like to take it. When I went to publish it everything went wrong, and I made the wrong decision in a dispassionate and unforced way, like very calmly I made the decision to click the wrong button, clicked again to confirm that I had intended to click the wrong button, and lost the whole post.

I had written at length about inevitability, and loss (losing records, discographies, whole music libraries, parts of yourself you didn't know you lost and parts of yourself that almost killed you in the very conscious losing), and accepting the grief of your fate with love and whatever joy you can. The irony was such that I could not be mad, could only confront the evidence of my own mind and hand and accept that I had written that post in order to destroy it. For the poetry of it? Who knows! I'm marinating in it.

Thought I dealt with it pretty well on the spot, chuckled at myself a bit, but it has been thirteen days and I haven't so much as approached a text field, so if by engaging that great irony and frustrating loss I intended to test myself I feel that I have fallen short. Got shook. I'll have to either change my generative procedures to more closely guard against loss or stick to my guns and continue to live on the edge of loss, grow into the individual that can pass that test whenever called upon.

These are the existential problems that life is all about. That, and hot beverages in the morning.

*

ALBUM WEEK
2019
CONTINUES
STILL

Ride the Lightning by Metallica is a truly great record, one of the best ever made by anybody anywhere. You can do what you like with this information.

*

There! There, blog. Let the healing begin.


--JL

*irl bonemancer.

**Catholic radio, Evangelical radio, some varietal of Protestant radio, some truly Christocult shit, the perennial local top forty station and the obligatory slot for some dude that calls himself "'Sick' Mike" whose voice sounds like Guy Fieri and Sam Kinison fucking each other hard after snorting up big rails of crank near some train tracks and when you look him up as a joke he's got a wikipedia page and is on the board of the local symphony orchestra and jazz society and is heavily involved in local charitable efforts and funding public programming and has a pretty insightful blog with like pictures of his kid sometimes so you feel this stupid connection with this goon who's got one of those smirks that looks as though someone pushed their pink chewing gum up and to the side as well as in when they stuck it on some surface. He seems like a good father to his daughter, and also like his skin was steam-cooked and has a good honest snap to it when it splits, revealing homogeneous ground meat. What music does he like? Hard to say; his CD collection is spread out throughout the (huge) house in various shelving units and his wall of records is very properly four walls, stuffed with vinyl, but all that plays on his station is nu-metal from the mid-aughts and stuff like Breaking Benjamin and Godsmack and Muse. His "opinion" segments and audience participation rituals are not things I like to discuss on Factually Pointless.***

***now I will have to write about that kind of stuff even though I would rather not. Not today, though.