#226

Logitech. All these damn library keyboards are logitech keyboards and man, there is a reason they do not cost very much. They're pretty new, I haven't seen this iteration of their logo before, but logitech is just reliably shitty. One rung above the kinds of brands that only exist long enough for the upper management of the company to abscond with conned millions, leaving unpaid hourly workers and ripped-off consumers in their wretched wake. 

Dunno, maybe this new logo impresses a new durability. I will say that it does not equate to improved ergonomics.

*

There is that school of thought that implies that ripped-off consumers are a section of the free market that has only itself to blame for its gullibility. Maybe it's a correct claim, but it's not really a fair one. The problem is that even simple maxims like "you get what you pay for" don't fill your pocket, so the countertautology to that is "you get what you can afford to pay for". And now we are circling down the drain of total uselessness together, one of us thinking it is rad and cool to basically steal from poor people and is impressed with someone who knows how to pick low-hanging fruit and one of us can only gesture weakly at the notion that it is better to not do that, though there is no cogent reason not to. 

You are free to con whoever you want. A sucker is, after all, born every minute. But if you have balls, I don't know why you'd pick on suckers. I guess the same reason people climb mountains. But the creature derided as a sucker is much more often merely desperate, merely hungry, so the nobility of conquering an obstacle simply because it is there is absent, at least so far as I can see. Anybody can piss on a fucking anthill. Punching down doesn't make you anything but a bully and a louse, in my opinion, but I can't argue with the fact that the world will treat you like a champion and suck your dick for it.

*

Hey, I'm mad that my local library, one of the most well-funded in the nation for the size of the population that it serves, buys crappy cheap keyboards! There's like thirty computers in this area I'm sitting in, plus special fancy computers for the blind and deaf and otherwise differently abled in another part of the library, but I'm mad that I can't punch the keys. Do you see this, my cried river?

Fuck it. You should see the size of the monitor. Hella crisp display, too. Nobody gives a fuck about keyboards as long as they work and this is a rich person's library, even though they let homeless people chill in it.

If you're bitching, the bitch is usually you. Nine times out of ten, you are the bitch. So it goes. 

*

Been missing teaching, so after this post is done and I kill whatever time is left before they open the doors, I'm going to go down to the local youth center and see if they have any paid writing instructor positions that I qualify for. Got decent experience, much of it through the center itself, so chances are even. Most writers ditch this town, see. Most writers try to go where the action is supposed to be. My action is wherever I happen to be. So there is hope. I will probably volunteer if they can't pay me, but if I do that I'll either demand and receive a raise at work or I will find a kitchen that isn't being strangled by managerial incompetence (or outright sabotage, I can't decide which because they tend to look so similar) and pays an adult wage. 

There are dishwashers around here making two fifty an hour more than I get for prepping and cooking two hundred pounds of food a day on average, plus running the shift and making the schedule and doing part of the orders and stocking the orders and putting out fires and whatever fucking else needs to get done. I have mentioned having to clean human feces. 

What I am getting at is that the punishment I have felt it is necessary to take by working my job is feeling pretty much over. I am now feeling like my rent is punishment enough, and it should be easier to make enough dough to cover it.

This has been more bitching, and once again, I am probably the bitch. Time to change that situation, one way or the other.

*

Keep forgetting to roll myself an after-work joint. That is another thing that has to change. I mean, it's fine today, because I prefer to do interviews sober (I am a square like that) but damn. Not doing the post high takes a lot of flavor out of it, honestly. A lot of writers and artists would look down their noses at me for this, but fuck them. I'm here to have fun.

Smoke weed every day, children. Go to sleep stoned and wake up to get high. Tell your parents I said so.


--JL

#225

Man, I really wanted to make posts on the seventh and the eleventh. Circumstances did not allow. Those same circumstances dictate that for the second time in this blog's run I am typing this ridiculous and aimless missive from a library computer, on one of their phenomenally displeasing keyboards. At least last time I got a keyboard where you could punch the keys, even if they were crappy. This one right here, not so much. No way to satisfyingly pound. The sexual element is entirely absent from this device. 

Nevertheless, my typing is without doubt the loudest in the computer area, and draws glances like a spoiled haunch of roadkill draws the circling flies, eager to breed and sow outright, squirming stares.

*

Pretty settled into the new place. Obviously I have been very busy with that, plus it's not like work just stops, and the new budget has not yet allowed for getting internet hooked up. Probably I'll look at that starting December or the New Year. Til then I'll hope to get a better keyboard when I come to write posts here at the library. Updates will probably be kinda sporadic this month. 

Next time I will write out all the lists I owe you, dear reader, and bring them here to type them into the post. I know how everybody loves all the lists. Gonna be some long ones. Remember how shortly before I started filling this text field with lists, I talked about how I don't really write lists anymore? How I wrote a whole post about not having pictures of myself on the internet, and now I use instagram like a mad bastard, microblogging almost as explicitly as I blog? 

Just not a fan of setting anything in stone. The right to change your mind is an important one to reserve, and doing so requires a set of muscles it is important to keep limber.

*

Ok, I'm sober and I hate it, so I'm going to be done for now. Last time I came to the library to write a post was Saturday, the ninth of the month, and on that day I had a joint for the walk here and a joint for the walk home but what I did not have was my phone, which is a requirement for logging into the blog machine. Man I felt put out. Man did I feel a fool. Then I felt better, as I smoked my second joint. 

Also I have seen three regular customers from work in the short time I've been here and it is difficult to put into words how much it irks me to lay eyes on them.  

*

Been writing into my notebooks with a variety of pencils. Generating some shit. If this keeps up I might open 2020 with a new book. The poems currently spilling from my guts in electrifying fugue states (the new desk works just fine, happy to note; good desks want you to get down to fucking business on them) are very pleasing to me. Hitting one of those rare veins that really gushes, words coming pretty much right the first time, requiring only a light burnish. As opposed to shitting something out knowing in your heart that maybe it can be fixed, but most likely it wants fire to cleanse it.

peace the fuck out and get tough or die crying

--JL

p.s. Oh! Halloween was great. Did a rad job with my costume.