#235

Crazy thing, just going through the process. Fuckin wakin up. Time after time you wake up, even after the nights you sweat into your sheets thinking there's no way, there's no way, these are my last hours of being alive and to sleep is to enter unbeing oblivion. You wake up and a cat wants something, or a lover, or you're alone and no one wants anything, and you have time to sit and have your first thoughts or you have to jump and start and let the thoughts trickle as they may through the business of movement. Thinking is all you're really good for, you suspect, have for some time, but the world demands movement of you as it does of every extant thing within its bounds, is itself never ever still. You think of a book by a physiologist who wrote in his book about other physiologists who believed that the purpose of organic life, of evolution, of time, is to create poses through movement, that the universe is a vast series of perfect frames, countless fractals of bodies in motion for no other reason than to be in motion. That the universe is dance, set to music more huge and complete than anyone but God could hear in all its fullness. Then you brush your teeth, if you're in the right place in life to remember that you gotta brush your teeth and the ability to follow through on the thought. Maybe you don't brush your teeth, maybe you just open a beer or go straight to work. Maybe you turn over and fuck somebody first, or leave them to their sleep after a kiss and murmurs. Having sex is the time of no thoughts, a time when the physiologists who speak of frames are perhaps most correct. Impressions, adjustments, convulsions, sensations. Only after do thoughts come, usually unwelcome, sometimes exalted. Leaving someone in bed is a little grief, a little practice for goodbye forever. But you leave when you leave, always early, to be the first student at the school building and relish to yourself the functionless but massive power that comes with that accomplishment, or to be early enough to work to leave early or work your full shift and tack an extra hour on the week by the end of it. Just to be early. Doesn't really matter, being late or on time, but the instinct and compulsion is to be early. Early to your own funeral? Even this is compelling, and so more than likely your first cigarette is smoked before seven in the morning, probably before six. Soon as you can make the space for it, at any rate. And whether you smoke four or nine or nineteen or twenty-four more, more than likely they will be smoked in the space before something, some phone call or task or appointment, using the time made available by being early. Smoking weed follows many of the same principles. Drinking distorts time, differently than dropping acid or eating shrooms, differently again the way tobacco and caffeine and weed do, but at any rate you perform time magic, with all these and with your friend's prescription methamphetamines, with video games, with typing and scribbling, with kicking rocks along the sidewalk you contort the time around yourself to fit your needs and you call it trying to get close to something like freedom and you think about freedom a lot, about infinite multiverses, about mistakes made and in the current offing, about the litany of failures that run a crooked line through your life, about how stupid crazy it is that you're still alive, still pulling in breath after breath and that muscle in your chest spinning your lifeblood flex after flex, step after step, looking up at the sky and considering the infinite, staring at the ground gnawing on some stupid brainbone. How much flight, how many minutes and gallons of fuel, how many explosions taken place within an internal combustion engine to get you to where you're standing now? When is the rent due in relation to the next paycheck? Where do you have to be next? Are you going to bother showing up? Is right now a good time to bomb everything, forget it all, quit the job, sever every tie you can and jettison yourself into a random horizon? Are you going to stick with what's going on right now? Are things level, or are they haywire? Are you in denial about either situation? Is it always both? Are questions fundamentally stupid? Are answers? Who cares?

Ah, who cares. The best question. The one that always makes me feel better right away, and lets me shut up for a little while.

--JL

#234

Every living thing was born to suffer and feel alien among its fellows. I believe even the ant and bee, even the branch on the tree and the leaf on the branch, are as my left hand and my right hand: even if joined in a oneness, cleaved from the whole. This is just one of the paradoxes of existence which torture us all, and ought to make us more tender towards one another in understanding of our shared pain. We have many more in common, each of us, no matter who or when or where or what. 

We were born to scar and smash and bloody our hands, chipping our fingernails in the scrabbling to hold on to our lives. Some rare few of us claim to have consented to and chosen their bodies and circumstances before birth, but the great mass of us did not ask to be born, or do not remember doing so, and at any rate the world is not ideal, often too painful to remain fully sane in, and we are never truly as good as we want to be. We have to lie to ourselves about so much just to get through being awake, nightmares may plague our sleep, the great roaring unknown of death may remind us every day that it awaits us, our fleeting pleasures sadly outnumbered by our griefs and ailments. There is no guarantee that our greatest loves and hopes and triumphs will not turn to dross, if not through the corrosion of time, then disintegrating rapidly before our very eyes. Even the things we choose to ignore, to disbelieve, the things we try to avoid and the things we took precautions against can reverse all our fortunes and kill us where we stand, and we have no guarantees about the hereafter save educated guesses and titanic acts of faith. This is true, best as I can tell, for practically everyone you might meet. 

So I was thinking we could stand to cut each other a lot more slack than we tend to. All of us being guilty before one another and all that. All of us just storm-tossed little boats on the same infinite ocean, beautiful and terrible.

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But also I just want everyone out of my face, pretty much.

Goodwill only for my fellow human. But it's not the season for conversations with me. A dude needs to eat all the silence he can snatch to himself sometimes.

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The world, by the way, is noisier than ever. Is the internet a new Tower of Babel? Will our tongues, tied together in this spiderweb, soon be sundered once more by catastrophe and collapse? I don't care! I don't want to have a fight about it!

--JL

#233

At the very bottom of every one of us scurries a frightened animal. Bundle of unthinking expressive instincts. Its exertions play their part all the way to the top. The top prefers not to acknowledge this, giving the animal all the more leeway to express its instincts. The top prefers castles in the air, illusions of control, delusions of grandeur, and other empty vanities. Well, we all want to be able to think we're gonna eat a hot dinner every night for the rest of our long, perhaps endless lives.

Being human is no sin. What else should we expect ourselves to be? The more human we realize we are, perhaps the more human we will become. No use writing a program for it, in my opinion. Time will pass, and we will see what we make of ourselves. The river is full of opposing forces, but in the end, it all flows the same way.

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Some say it's all coming down, and some say it's just firing up. This has been true for every society, through all recorded history. People, sane and deluded, educated and untutored, wise and foolish, say both of these things. Both of their predictions come true. The river flows. 

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It's ok to take the long view. Fuck 'em if they tell you no. 

--JL

#232

Two three two. GOOD NUMBER. Enjoyable. A little spike of a number. What a cutie.

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Had a thought about what I might want to blog about, came straight to the computer, thought immediately gone. It happens. There is no sense getting attached to the thing that might have been. The only thing to do is hammer out the thing that will be. 

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Either decide to act, or allow yourself to be compelled. The act of taking no action is a sort of art. Inaction being a form of action, sitting on your hands or walking away completely is as ringing a statement as plunging into the most heated and productive activity. 

In extremis, and in the humdrum of every single day, there is often no right course of action. No one can blame you for what you do or don't do in these instances, though many will be happy to throw it in your teeth and some will even take it upon themselves to punish you for it. Choosing to deserve this punishment, choosing to act in order to curry favor or garner praise and advantage, choosing to take the course which seems best and most virtuous to you regardless of personal cost or gain, choosing the lesser of two evils, taking the easy way out, handing off the choice to another, doing nothing at all--in these moments it is only you and the choice, which is is singular in the universe, no outcomes are knowable, and only God knows the complete story and the role your choice will play in the song of infinity. In the end, and in fact, all choices are the same, none better than another, and there is nowhere to lay your blame.

So we punish each other for the choices that we make. We see no other way to make our choices seem material. We relate everyone else's choices to perceived outcomes for ourselves, and judge individuals for the choices that they make so far as we can account for them and so much as they reinforce what we already feel, think, and believe to be good and right, or offend us for their breach of such. On the malign strength of this miscreant data, we consign other human beings to psychic hells in our own hearts, and occasionally, when given the opportunity, hurt or kill them. We hurt life, maim it, chain it, and torture it to death in the name of being better than those living things we degrade and deny. We feel like heroes. Like human beings performing a sacred duty. Like good people.

Or we forgive, and lay no blame, remembering how little it really is that we know. 

Just saying, in short, if you're really out to punish someone, you're probably wrong.

But it is after all your choice. You must act as you see fit. Everything is in deciding for yourself what is just, and taking responsibility for what that justice looks like. In deciding what you believe the right thing to do really is. That is between you and yourself, and nobody else. 

--JL

#231

Conclusions drawn by living people about what history has "led up to" inform their opinions and actions. This produces more history. We all help fill in the blanks no matter what we do or where we are or what is going on. Our ignorance of history, our acceptance of sound bites, slogans, and short, one-sided versions of long and densely complex stories in lieu of long and inconvenient journeys into the thickets of facts, secrets, lies, and exaggerations in pursuit of a truth that we will never truly know keeps us slaves to repetition and futility, but it is understandable. Society cannot develop itself on the unactionable murk of scholarly doubt. It needs grist for its multiplying hydra of devouring mills, the healthsome whole grains of infallible sciences, convenient truths, and interchangeable political realities to bake into bread. The people need their bread to get through the day. This is a truth you can't avoid.

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I would straight-up let an AI plug me into a virtual world. Perhaps I already have. Who gives a fuck?

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Slowly reading War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, broken up by quickly-read books of poetry. Perhaps I should track the reading in a separate blog, or just an updating text file posted somewhere. Or never mention it again. Time will tell, won't it?

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ok peace

--JL