#194

About halfway through Nicholas Nickleby, which made me very much want to read The BFG again real quick (Dahl's Chickens, so funny), which on completion which made me want to read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory again real quick, which I also did. 

Man, I've had those two books for more than twenty years and more than seven moves, one of them transcontinental. They're still in fine shape given all that, holding together well, but their age definitely shows, the pages past their initial yellowing and roughening and going into the tan tones and suede textures. In a few years they'll begin to crinkle and throw a little dust as the paper cracks minutely, and then they'll really start to fall apart. For right now, they're still trusty, though. Amazing how things can last.

*

Not going to give any details, but I got so fucking lied to today! It was pretty mind-blowing to be lied to in such a fashion. Truly incredible. I mean this was weapons-grade, fully delusional lying. I knew a reality that a person did not know I knew, and they proceeded to attempt to insert a complete fabrication into what they assumed was void. In doing so, they revealed more true information about themselves to me than they have in almost a year of knowing them.

For example, this person has never read The Art of War.

Like, it's not new information, exactly, but such a resounding confirmation that it became comical; at first, my hands were trembling with outrage, but as time went on, the humor outweighed it.

Now there is mostly just pity. I mean at the end of the day it is extremely pathetic. I have lied like that in my lifetime; having been in this wretched position, I know intimately how low you have to fall, how painful it is to need to convince yourself and how doubly painful it is to need someone else to believe that you aren't as weak and scared and fumbling you are, to support a whole world where that isn't true and heaven itself be damned if the world I ask for contradicts the world that is. 

No, I'm no better than this person at all, but the way things stand, I suppose it doesn't matter. Math starts at different places for different things.

*

My will, these days, is bent on telling the truth, as far as any human can manage such a thing. This means I cannot stay too angry with liars, and don't deserve to; it is incredibly, brutally difficult not to lie, and once you really try to stop, you understand why you need to a lot better, and you catch yourself trying to do it a lot more. Difficulty compounds again as one experiments with the rigor of considering certain silences a type of lie, or an outright one.

Only an idiot blurts the truth at all times, needful or not, though; a measure of idiocy is called for in life, I think, but not the whole damn hog. 

Yet I don't know. Perhaps the discipline is exactly that demanding, and perhaps idiocy isn't valuable precisely unless it is carried too far.

Anyway I am as guilty as anyone, no matter what I say or who lies to me.

*

Maybe maybe maybe. Whatever. I had some really fun thoughts about cutting things up in the kitchen today, overwrought meditations on the nature of knifework. On my walk home in the blazing summer heat I texted them to a couple of coworkers:

"Good knifework approaches Euclidean geometries"

"The purpose of the knife is to make the smoothest, truest lines through the apparent chaos of the organic and effect the approximation of even particles, which could at pains be reconstituted beautifully"

"A knife doesn't destroy, it creates the possibility for harmonious rearrangements"

Those were my private ideas on cutting vegetables and sundry, then I shared them with my friends, and now, you too are burdened with these notions. Will you think of them, I wonder, the next time you approach an onion, or prepare to carve a bird? 

It does not matter, but if it should happen, I humbly pray it enriches the experience. Even if as you read them right now you consider me an overblown douchebag--it could still happen, and I hope it does. 

*

Other things that have happened include going on a beautiful very sunny date on which sushi was consumed and a riverbank thoroughly lazed on, receiving my paring knife in the mail, and some mighty glorious skies to look at. It's been hella summer here, stupendous shit, never gets old. 


--JL