#315

Finished A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which left me most determined to reread Ulysses once I'm done with all this Murakami. On that front, the instant I had completed the above text, I pulled out The Elephant Vanishes, swallowed it whole, finished it last night, and this morning I read South of the Border, West of the Sun to completion and began Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. Once I've put that one to bed, it'll be 1Q84, then First Person Singular, and then the rereading will begin: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, The Strange Library, Wind/Pinball, Norwegian Wood, After Dark, Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and then maybe Killing Commendatore--but I'm not sure about that last one. It's a definite possibility. Then, as I say, Ulysses, perhaps Dubliners, then as much Ursula K. Le Guin as I can cram in before the new year. Once that happens, I shall alternate nonfiction with poetry until I run out of fuel, though I seriously need to read at least fifty and perhaps more than one hundred nonfiction books next year, so help me. When I have exhausted myself, I will reread all my Kurt Vonnegut books, which happens to be all of them--except his Letters, and that one little book which is his first short story and his last short story. Don't think those have to count. I have everything else, from Sirens of Titan to Timequake, including Canary in a Cat House, one of my very rarest books.

ANYHOW THAT'S THE PLAN, and God may laugh but there it is. We have no choice but to lay it out sometimes, and risk being a cosmic punchline. Well, more of a cosmic punchline than we already are. 

*

Ever since I was quite young, I have conceived of a piece of spacetime after death in which it's just you, free of your body but still your own self, and a calculable, comfortable manifestation of the Almighty--an old man, a giant cat, a floating radiant crystal; whatever you want, I guess--who "sits" down with you--I always picture a brown leather couch--and goes over your lifetime stats, gives you a director's commentary, and lets you in on every joke you've ever been to small and too limited by perspective to see or appreciate. Then, after this blow-by-blow of your lifetime, seen from enough new angles that it would take a few lifetimes to see--the next thing, of who knows how many things. Or life again, exactly the same! Or the loop is instantaneous. Or it's the next life, as someone or something completely different. Or it's all something completely different. Having been encoded with a premium Catholic programming early in life, I've also always thought and felt there must be some kind of Last Battle, before some timeless time of perfect peace and bliss preceding the end of the universe and the beginning of another, infinite universes stretched out before and behind us, or the same universe again infinitely. 

All we know for sure is that death is coming! Maybe tomorrow. Maybe later today. Maybe sometime further off, but coming to meet you surer than anything else in this world.

*

Very much would like to put out a book this December and a couple more early in 2023, but we will see! I have most unwisely made such promises before, and that has only caused me personal anguish when unable to deliver. This book, for example, would contain the play I said I would publish over two years ago, finally done, but too short to stand alone. Also some essays, and difficult-to-categorize piece of poetry. If it can be called poetry.

*

On that note, I have actual work to do. Enough horsing around, dear reader. 

Enough.

--JL

#314

Got a bunch of books. Also have been reading a bunch of books, though, not as many as I would like. Finished rereading all my Tolkien, then reread Laurence Yep's excellent Dragon of the Lost Sea cycle, which I had not done since I was a wee sprat--used to check 'em out of my local library branch over and over. Think I've mentioned that. Then I read Prince Ombra, another book I had not read since in a long time. I read this one once, when I was eleven, maybe twelve, at my best friend's insistence. Didn't remember all of it with my customary clarity, but a few scenes have stuck with me through the many years, and the work as a whole was more formative and influential than I would ever have guessed. An amazing book. I mean seriously, that book is truly something. Read After the Quake and Kafka on the Shore, and am currently almost done with James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, borrowed from my mom at her insistence. Apparently Mr. Stephen Dedalus reminded her of her own firstborn (yours truly). I cannot deny certain affinities--even echoes. After that, the plan is to read a bunch more Murakami, reread Ulysses and perhaps more Joyce--probably just Dubliners, dunno if I want to get into Finnegan's Wake till next year, and at least a bit of Le Guin before I hit the nonfiction again.

There's really a lot of nonfiction I've been meaning to get to: a book about diamonds, a book about the Wars of the Roses, a book about metahistory, a book about Jerusalem, a book about math; books about a whole bunch of fuckin shit. Too many books, not enough time or money. Why, why won't the government pay to me to read like a madman every day? Can they not grasp my potential value as an intelligence asset? Fools! Squanderers!!! Just fucking make me a spot, feds!

Uh, speaking of books, I've grabbed too many this month and should have tabulated them, but didn't. Because of these factors, the following list may not be exhaustive, and I shouldn't--damn it, won't!--get more new books at the very least till well into next year. 

We'll see how that goes.

*

The Very Eric Carle Treasury, Eric Carle

Tono Monogatari, Shigeru Mizuki

The Cricket in Times Square, George Seldon

The Rescuers, Margery Sharp

Black Zodiac, Charles Wright

What Have I Ever Lost by Dying?, Robert Bly

Memoirs, Dreams, Reflections, C.G. Jung

Love That Dog, Sophie Creech

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, Kafka on the Shore, First Person Singular, Haruki Murakami

The Trumpet of the Swan, E.B. White

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain (not strictly necessary, since I own a complete collected works of his, but whatever. Maybe a gift someday after read it, or before, who cares)

Early Christian Lives, a bunch of people (Penguin Classics, publishers)

The Universe Within: The Deep History of the Human Body, Neil Shubin

Life in Ancient Egypt, Adolf Erman, transl. H.M. Tirad, introduction by Jon Manchip White

After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre

The Templars and the Grail: Knights of the Quest, Karen Ralls

The Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar: Solving the Oak Island Mystery, Steven Sora

Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic, Ingrid D. Rowland (Really extremely excited to read this)

The Long Valley, John Steinbeck

Squire, Sarah Alfageeh and Nadia Shammas

DEAS...and Other Imaginings: Ten Spiritual Folktales for Children, Valerie Tarico

The World According to Garp, John Irving

Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, Elvis Costello

The Abolitionist's Handbook, Patrice Cullors

Birds, Tim Flach (this was a wedding anniversary present from Ezra and it is supremely magnificent)

Fairy Tale, Stephen King

Principles of Isotope Geology, second edition, Gunter Faure 

The Complete Practical Guide to Pet and Aviary Birds, David Alderton

Nobody Knows My Name, James Baldwin

The House at Pooh Corner, A.A. Milne

*

Cool ok that's all I got time for MAY NOVEMBER BE A VERITABLE BLITZ OF PRODUCTION PRASE GOD

--JL

#313

Among my very early memories is running around the little vacation home complex my mother's side of the family used to have on the coastal city of Puerto La Cruz. There was the swimming pool where I learned to swim, in which I cracked my chin so hard once on one of the submerged hubcap lights that I thought my little face had started to split in two. Stung like a hornet got me, silver bubbles rose with my screams shivering inside them, blood billowed into the water, and to this day, my beard won't grow on that little line where the gash was, though it's smooth and unmarked when shaved. On a separate occasion, I scraped most of the skin off my knee, enough that there was a little eyelet of white beaded with crimson glaring out of the oozing, flowing pink when my mom wiped it before disinfecting it. I yelled and fought and begged her to leave it, to no avail. My father, too, shed blood there; once went for a run and returned dripping sweat all over and with blood running down his shin from his own injured knee. Sitting by him on the front steps, I asked why come it didn't hurt him; in my own experience, bleeding that much meant you were having an experience that demanded unwilling tears and venting the sensation by dint of screaming. He told me that when you get older, you get used to pain, that it doesn't mean as much as when you're little. 

I have grown more like my father, as one does. For example, I was never the most powerful or technically adept wrestler; though strong and skilled enough to matter, my true advantages were my quickness and the fact that no one could ever hurt me badly enough to easily turn me into meat. Whatever they did to me, I kept fighting, shoving pain aside. Once I took a spill from a moving motor scooter (well, three separate times) and smashed the living hell out of my right knee, losing a bunch of skin there and on my arms and elbows. My knee and various connected muscles and tendons were quite damaged and forever changed by this incident, but I did not go to hospital--I walked it off that day and for weeks and months afterwards. Cleaned and took care of my own wounds, and took care of my own leg my own way. 

Guess this tangent is just to say that to age in a body is, in a sense, to grow numb; to become ever more inured. 

What I was actually getting at when I started writing is that the complex concierge's daughter, a lithe dark girl with jet-black eyes, was about my age, and we used to run around together sometimes. Early on, when we were about three or getting near four, she told me she had to go poop. I said I'd wait for her right where we were standing, on the grass on the side of one of the buildings, and she said she didn't want to go home. She skinned her underwear down and off under her skirt, squatted where she stood, and took the biggest shit, proportionally, that I have ever seen anyone take in my entire life. It was bigger around than her arm and almost as long. 

Though I had no problem, intellectually, understanding what had happened, and her reasoning, though quite alien to mine own (in my mind, shitting outside of a toilet was something done only while camping, and only when your parent was with you to help you bury it), was sound enough--"when you gotta go, you gotta go" is a tautology every human understands--I found myself astonished, abandoned by my faculties. I told her that her poop was the biggest one I'd ever seen, and she ran away, underwear clutched in her fist. Later, I went out to look at it again and found it crawling with flies. The grass was so incredibly green, the scat such a dark and vivid brown, the flies as black and gleaming as madness itself. Don't know if anyone found it before we left for home. Don't remember hanging out with her again.

Only three years later, the neighborhood bully in my section of the university housing complex we lived in when we first moved to the United States, a huge-boned hefty red-haired girl a few years older than I was, urinated in front of me in a secluded little grove of pines behind and in between a couple of the buildings, fenced off from the street and obscured from the view of passersby in the courtyard in front of the buildings. She made me stay in the grove, and by all accounts didn't let me watch, telling me to be her lookout; though she suggested that a boy who saw a girl pee was destined to marry her, implying that if I looked over my shoulder I would be sealing a form of accord with her.

"Did you peek?" She asked, after zipping up.

"No. Can we get out of here."

"Yeah, stupid. Get away from me, ok? You're such a stupid little kid."

*

No idea whatsoever what it is about me that brought these incidents on. I was but a lad, and still don't fully grasp what was happening, to be honest. I've never remembered this kind of thing during talk therapy; they did me no harm and did not foster in me any kinks or deep-seated dissatisfactions or dissonant confusions. I believe they merely make up a part of the tapestry of my memory that displays a profound mystification with what other people want and how they express their desire for it. Also that shit just happens, and nobody can stop it.

--JL

#312

Speaking of music, a thing that happened even since last time I wrote at length about The Mountain Goats--not so long ago--is that they put out yet another new album, Bleed Out. It's a very good album. Like, way better than I expected it to be given the pace of release lately. Not all the time, but too often, when artists put out work at an increased rate, it goes hand in hand with a certain compromise in quality. This record is as crazy good as Dark in Here, which really says a great deal. The last three albums could any one of them and as a group of three be the very best they've ever made, though I might say that about many groups of three of their albums. Anyhow, my favorite tracks off Bleed Out, for the nonce: "Bones Don't Rust", "Guys on Every Corner", "Incandescent Ruins", "Bleed Out", and a couple more though I'm not ready to say which. Have to listen to it some more, though I have listened to it quite a bit.

In point of fact, I'm doing a project I haven't done in several years now, which is smacking all the extant Mountain Goats music I can get onto a single playlist and listening to the whole thing on shuffle. It's going fair smoothly; I've had problems in the past with the device losing its place or playing something else without my telling it so. This current phone and current build of iTunes/"Music"/whatever is treating me ok, though, and am a few hours into a 28-hours-plus endeavor.

Since I mostly listen to music in the car, trips to and from work or over to see my parents are the main avenue. Need to listen to the phone try its best all alone or use a bluetooth speaker, since the car won't play CD's or tapes or fucking anything except the radio, and not very well. The van does whatever you could want, but I leave driving that to Ezra. In the kitchen, while doing dishes or cooking, I listen to a CD on our shiny blue boombox. It's got a Spinosaurus sticker and a Psittacosaurus sticker on it. 

*

Believe it or not, I still haven't got around to completing Paradise Lost. Part of the way through Steppenwolf and Los Años Extraordinarios, but I put all of that on hold to reread all of George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire stuff--Fire and Blood, The World of Ice and Fire, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, and the main ASoIaF series. 

That other stuff is still on hold at the moment because I'm rereading all my J.R.R. Tolkien; wrapped up The Silmarillion, Beren and Lúthien, and The Children of Húrin, finishing up Unfinished Tales, then when that's done, on to The Fall of Gondolin, the appendices to The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings itself for last.

Frankly, I'll try to finish the other stuff, but probably what will happen is once I'm finished with the Tolkien I will read my new Haruki Murakami books, and then maybe probably reread all the other ones I have and maybe buy some more I don't have and read those. It's just what I'm feeling. We'll see. After that I'm thinking about Ursula K. Le Guin. Or a bunch of science/history/philosophy books. We'll see. That's far ahead. You never know. We will just have to see.

*

Ok cool whatever BYE

--JL

#311

Hey! Look! I'm still alive! Motherfuckers reading this must be beside themselves, all shitting and pissing uncontrollably with overweening joy that I have deigned to type a word into a text field. 

You're all most welcome. One of the cats is asleep on my lap, so I don't wanna get up, plus I'm all finished with clicking around internet for now, and lack the critical wherewithal to work on actual material--what by all rights I ought to be doing with this time. So here I am.

Actually, I've tried to work on the next post a great many times and have sunk effort into three or four separate drafts--something I try not to do, for the very good reason that drafting kills my momentum in this space stone dead. Gotta rattle off the piece and smash the publish button in one go; that's how it's done and that's how to do it. But here I am, with thousands of words all backed up in the ether and nothing fit to show for it. 

In lieu of any of that, I'll just knock off some random shit, like I'm supposed to, as is my god-granted right, in accordance with my artistic mission.

*

For the longest time I've meant to mention how much I like the band World's End Girlfriend. Now I have! Fuck YES! It's finally happened! They are a really fucking good band. Here's a list of some of the bands/artists I've gotten into in the last couple of years that, for one reason or another, I fail or forget to mention anything about:

• World's End Girlfriend
• Magic Sword
• Le Matos
• Lera Lynn
• Iannis Xenakis
• Sidney Gish
• Jeff Rosenstock
• Fantastic Negrito 
• Rainbow Kitten Surprise

Here's an appended list of artists/bands I've gotten back into or appreciated in a new way:

• The Fiery Furnaces
• Wolves in the Throne Room
• Caribou
• Tegan and Sara
• Architecture in Helsinki
• Arcade Fire
• Broken Social Scene

*

Bought of bunch of Haruki Murakami books, and they should arrive at my house today. While buying my own books (I am still the main purchaser of my own books, but I hardly expect more than that in my lifetime or beyond), I decided I wanted a treat from the giant logistics company that wasn't just my own stuff or ten-pound bags of prunes.

Haruki Murakami is one of those dudes that's so famous in the English latitudes, like Hayao Miyazaki, that I would feel weird writing out his name in the correct order. This bothers me, but I can't do much about it.

*

Don't know why the spacing between paragraphs sometimes seems off on the posts. Why would a setting change without being changed? Why do I bother asking? I'll just do my best to fix it later, if I'm doing the wrong thing, aesthetically, now. It barely matters, except that it drives me fucking bugshit.

*

EAT THAT BITCHES TOTALLY A FUCKIN POST 

IT TOTALLY FUCKIN HAPPENED
ROCK N FUCKIN ROOOOOOOLLLLLLLLLLLL

--JL

p.s. the Murakami books I got were:

The Elephant Vanishes

After the Quake

South of the Border, West of the Sun

p.p.s. I also got this book that I haven't read since my old best friend lent it to me when we were kids. Prince Ombra, by Roderick MacLeish. I remember this book being a fuckin' trip. It didn't arrive till well after the other books in the order, and I plumb forgot I'd bought it. Nice surprise.

#310

 How 'bout some memories? Why not, right? 

*

Couple beers in and I'm spinning off a yarn, threaded silver with witticism. My audience--at the time, my girlfriend and my best friend--are laughing hard enough to cry and gasp, but I do not relent for even a second--the sight spurs me. I take it up a notch. At the time, under the prevailing conditions, this requires zero effort. Pausing briefly only to swig from my dark brown bottle of stout, I lean forward, pull faces, gesture ridiculously. Keeping up the patter, lighting up a cigarette. Their faces are red, they lean back in their chairs to clear the way for breath to reenter their lungs as it may, they beg me to stop between gales of laughter, but I have a goal in mind, a shining line to kill it with, and there is no deterring me. It's all worth it when I get there. Worth it in every sense, for everyone, most of all me, and I relish in it, the power of being able to sustain the verbal dervish that eludes me so completely when sober. 

By the time I'm five beers in, I don't say much. Eight beers in, done talking for the night. Just sit there, drunk. Just sit, while they talk incomprehensibly around me, my ears choked with thoughts made of dark fire, thoughts overburdened with incommunicable meaning. We've had our fun. Now it's dark. And it will get darker, each time, until the end of the line, until life heaves itself into a new configuration for all of us.

Now, these days, can't remember a word of what I said. Dunno what even the hell I was talking about. My best friend hasn't reached out or answered my attempts at contact in over ten years. My ex-girlfriend is even more reclusive than I am; an accomplishment that lives closer to the humorless truth involved in the jokes I tell about myself--hermit, shut-in, non-participant in society. Am I to blame for this state of affairs? Largely, perhaps entirely.

Was it really worth it, all of it, the nights around that wooden table laden with poisons, gritty with ash? All that came of that rough and drunken circle? Though I couldn't defend it materially, I have to believe that it is so. There is no other choice in life.

*

Smoking a cigarette late, late at night by my door, on the tiny wooden platform up the slippery wooden steps. The lower floor and basement of the house behind me is unoccupied; no one uses the front door. I use the back, which opens on a stairway up the second floor, where I live alone. Worn down from work, eyes stinging from too much reading and too little sleeping, hunched over beneath the weight of my leather jacket, I reflect that I have possibly never been as lonely. The feeling makes me smile. The realization makes me savor the thought of it, the suffering in it I have always been more or less immune to in the past. I have changed, I realize. I have become more human.

*

A friend and I had breakfast at the nicest diner in town and went down to the river to talk. We choose a couple bridges to suspend ourselves over the water on, let it pull itself and everything that can settle on its tension beneath us. We go down to the shoreline and balance on the mossy stones. I take my shoes and socks off and wade in till the water rises to the middle of my calves, the current lazy, the water almost as warm as my skin, the minnows nibbling, the sun searing down like a laser and the cool swooping in like a savior with the patchy clouds.

We talked about her memories of her trip around the world. She told me about roaming around Australia, about getting by in Russia. A boy she fucked in Barcelona, a sweetness that turned dangerous and had to be escaped. This was a pattern with her, the sweet, sensible masks that boys she fell for disposed of down the line. She told me about some dreams she had in Japan, a psychic she saw in Tokyo, how she came to realize reincarnation was real, remembered some of her past lives. A time when she was her sister's mother. 

She is dead, now. May her next life break the circle. May our lives all break the circle. Or not. Whatever the will of God may be. May we see one another again, beyond this strange and shadowed veil. If it is not to be, may she find the peace and satisfaction that so often eluded her in her body's time scrambling on the surface of the earth.

*

More like this soon? Maybe something completely different?

Only! Time! Will! Tell!

--JL

#309

Library was having a bag sale to...celebrate? Commemorate? Capitalize on moving their archives to a new location. Pick your favorite "c". My whim dictated that this particular sale spell an end to my not getting that many books, at least not all at once, and I have come up with a haul as in the days of yore. So yes sir, two bags full sir--of books! Not bad at all for ten bucks flat. Bag sales are very thrilling that way.

Let's do a list, like we love to do. We love lists here at Factually Pointless, and believe me, I decide to not show more lists than I post. Always wantin' to list shit up ins, folks. Always.

Anyway. 

The Best American Short Stories 2014, ed. Jennifer Egan

Balkan Ghosts, by Robert D. Kaplan

The Founding Fish, by John McPhee

Glastonbury, by Donna Fletcher Crow

Beauty Is a Wound, by Eka Kurniawan

The Well and the Mine, by Gin Phillips, introduced by Fannie Flagg

García Márquez en Cartagena-Sus Inicios Literarios, by Jorge García Usta

Europe 1880-1945, by J.M. Roberts, Silver Library edition

John Adams, by David McCullough

A Slight Trick of the Mind, by Mitch Cullum

The Realm of Fiction: 61 Short Stories, ed. James B. Hall

The Solace Is Not the Lullaby, by Jill Osier, foreword by Carl Philips

Blood & Iron-From Bismarck to Hitler/the Von Moltke Family's Impact on German History, by Otto Friedrich

Families of the World-Family Life At the Close of the 20th Century/East East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific, by Hélène Tremblay

Alarms & Diversions, by James Thurber

Moral Voices/Moral Selves-Carol Gilligan and Feminist Moral Theory, by Susan J. Hekman

Three Girls From Bronzeville, by Dawn Turner

The Art of Fiction-Notes on Craft for Young Writers, by John Gardner

All Loves Excelling, by Josiah Bunting III

Words, Thoughts, and Theories, by Alison Gopnick and Andrew N. Meltzoff

Writers Reading At Sweetwaters-An Anthology of Poetry and Prose, ed. by Chris Lord and Esther Hurwitz

Leone Leoni, by George Sand

The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space, by Douglas Trevor

A Little Chatter, by Terry Connell

Middle-Earth, by Henri Cole

In All This Rain, by John Stone

Tell Me a Riddle, by Tillie Olsen

Semantics-A New Outline, by F.R Palmer

Idylls of the King, by Alfred Lord Tennyson

Pocho, by José Antonio Villarreal

Typee, by Herman Melville, afterword by Harrison Hayford

The King Must Die, by Mary Renault

The Reader's Companion to American History, ed. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty

I also grabbed a spare copy of Tristram Shandy and a Dover thrift edition of Kafka's Metamorphoses (plus those near-ubiquitous Other Stories) just to lend them out when so inspired, or perhaps serve as a pair of the foundation stones for a Little Free Library of our own, on our yard. We'll see.

*

Cool! Man, what a complete waste of fucking time. Hope this blog gets good again soon. Got a feeling something might actually happen this week. Just a tingle in the fingers, perhaps--maybe--some sparks in the back of the mind. 

Again, we'll see.

--JL

#308

Drove to work bright and early this morning only to find the parking lot empty and the garage and gates locked. As I cruised the scene to make sure to myself that there was truly no one else there and no one was going to show up, the realization dawned: spent too long in the service industry. Too many years working every single holiday except Christmas Day and New Year's. Worked some of those, too. 

Pour one out for everyone consigned to the more permissive levels of modern slavery today. I need hardly mention that many should be poured out often for all those consigned to any form of modern slavery. A lot of bad shit happens to a lot of unlucky people every day, and in most cases, the people with the power to do something about it are prevented from doing so for a multitude of reasons both legitimately constraining and merely selfish. All those of us without such powers or constraints can do, we ought to, even if it's just to bear witness in our hearts, and feel something about it.

*

Indeed, being as we're already talking about this particular national holiday and gross, avoidable human misery, perhaps I'll allow myself a word or three on the way this Supreme Court majority is popping off. "Happy fucking fourth of July! Abortion is literally murder because of twelfth-century British common law, so fuck 2022, fuck society, and fuck women. The EPA can't tell anyone nothing! Every company that wants to belch all the carbon they can into the atmosphere can do so with impunity as far as we're concerned. And we're just getting started, you godless cumsluts. Lube those shitty little assholes while you can, 'cause we're coming in full bore."

Honestly fucking grim. I joke but do not laugh. Is it even a joke? Everything bad I was afraid would happen six years ago is happening, because every bad thing I was afraid would happen fourteen years ago happened. You don't even want to know the shit I'm afraid of right now. Happy fourth of July, we might not have another because our government is no longer a republic or a democracy. A cadre of unelected officials are dictating public policy with formal impunity to the detriment of the population, a corrupt and totally ineffectual legislative branch whines for the camera--all the majority of them know how to do, seemingly--and an ancient, doddering figurehead moans and gestures from a discredited office. 

I dunno, man. Just looks shitty. Like some fast-forward fall of Rome shit. Checks and balances right out the fucking window.

Ah, well. What can you do but watch it play out and try to make the best decisions you can based on what you see. Personally, I'll just keep going to work and reading books. Perhaps lay by a goodly stock of nonperishable goods and potable water. Pray and think, and think and pray. Practice dying an honest man in my mind, that I may be ready if called upon.

--JL

#307

Ugh! Time. It passes, events in its slipstream mass, accrete, gain specific gravity, and settle into an orbit from which they are difficult to deviate by main force. Took a whole trip to Chicago since last I posted! Had a little ten-day vacation between the end of school and taking on work as a bus washer until school starts up again! Also, have had a lot of intricate, heavily plotted dreams wherein having sex with a variety of extremely hot women was integral to many of them, about one woman every three dreams. This probably indicates that I could use a girlfriend, but who knows. Sometimes extracurricular romance is a healthy and natural thing (provided all generals and particulars are honest, open, and aboveboard) and sometimes it's the devil in you, jerking you around by the glands. Hard to say! Hard to say.

*

Chicago is always pretty cool. Love being in that city. As a born city boy, merely the sight of many tall buildings, let alone being amongst them, is soothing to the mind. Love a small town, love the great wilderness even more, farms are cool, I can hang anywhere and thrive, but there's something about a city that is particular, and that something particular to each city, and I love Chicago and Chicago's particular thing very much. My dad used to work there, both my brothers went to college there. It's a thing with our family, hanging out in Chicago. Ezra hadn't been since some barely-remembered middle school trip, so we did some basic tourist things; crashed at an err bee and bee on the south side, up to the big skydeck on top of Willis Tower (I would say the weirdest part of Sears being in its grave is decidedly the new name for the tower--why couldn't they have kept the name on, I wonder? Because we fucking hate history in this country, history can fuck off and die, we say--the new Skydeck, incidentally, had a lot less history than it did the last time I was up there), Shedd Aquarium, all day the next day at the Field Museum basically, and on the last day we wandered about Millennium Park till it was time for the train to leave. Next time we'll do some more stuff like that but also try to get to a couple of the neighborhoods less traveled and also try to spend more time there in general. I like to spend a lot of time in museums, and can easily spend two days in the Chicago Institute of Art. Like to see Pilsen and Hyde Park, too. We took the Line everywhere, as is right and proper. 

*

We had breakfast at this place kind of at the bottom of a hotel near the lake twice called Little Branch--man, that place was just rad. Loved their digs, their food, and their smoothies. Also had a big ole cup of Mexican chocolate and that was extremely legit as well.

*

Everything, of course, cost way too much damn money, But that's part of it. So fuck it.

*

Doing a thing of reading several books at once at the moment. Here is what they are and how it is going:

Still reading John Milton's Paradise Lost. I dunno, I like it, and I read bunches of it at once, but it doesn't seem to finish. And there's two more poems in the book after that, Samson Agonistes and Lycidas. Damn, boy. I mean. he's good, he's fucking brilliant and all, but damn. Something about it is just slow.

Los Años Extraordinarios, by Rodrigo Cortés--pretty early on, but it's damn awesome. I read a lot slower in Spanish--maybe have mentioned this--but it's important, so we soldier on. In this case in particular, gotta stop and look up words pretty much on every page 'cause the dude has a word fetish, which is cool. Yet, there's a reason I need to break this thing up with other books.

Sometimes a Great Notion, by Ken Kesey--loving this bad boy. The one on which progress is proportionally the most voracious at the moment. Kesey really is fucking Steinbeck-level Great American Novelist, boys, you heard it from me and you can take it to the bank. Might have to reread Sailor Song soon. There's a book that smacked my brain and changed me around.

Jason & Medeia, by John Gardner--call me what you want. but this is way fucking better than Paradise Lost. Like, way better. This shit is intense and way more readable. Dope poem, makes me want to work on something like this that's been rattling in my brain for a long time.

*

Whichever one of these I finish first will give way to Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse. Love my Hesse. Gotta find that book of fairy-stories of his, that shit is fire. Also everything the man wrote, pretty much.

*

Ok bye gotta eat gotta write more still getting used to everything but hardcore production will, I pray, resume sooner rather than later because I really want it to ok yes cool peace

--JL

#306

Made mention yesterday of how yard work is perhaps not my preferred task; not really my thing. Did some yesterday and even more today, and this served as a reminder that often, at least when under your own steam as opposed to under coercion--and if one can do it under coercion, more power to one--the trick to activity is to just bear with it till the endorphins kick in and you can lose yourself in it, do philosophy, listen to the voice of God. This can take a lot of time, but I believe there's a knack for it one can foster and encourage within themselves. Some people are probably born with it, but growing up, I had to force myself to do anything I didn't immediately enjoy and demonstrate a talent for.

If you are like this yourself, I recommend sticking with stuff--the payoff's pretty good even if the thing is bullshit and doesn't really matter. One of the great significances of life is giving meaning of yourself to whatever lies before you. Also in raising your skill ceiling whenever possible, gaining cross-class skills, just generally increasing your capacity. There is joy in watching your own numbers go up before they inevitably roll back to zero. The question of where we put our points is the question of who we are as people, which, personally, is a vital question indeed.

*

Plip ploop! These posts sure are a lot of nothing. Well, I'm finding my way back to it. Though pointlessness is the name of this game, so, I really can't lose, except when I make a point, which is still an ironic win. Tasting nothing but pure victory, time after time, baby. Love it.

Will tomorrow be the day my words catch fire and I give this space something more real, brighter, harder, alive? Something to chew on and come into? Strap in. Maybe for nothing. Who knows! Uncertainty rules this chaotic existence with an wavering, unsteady scepter.

PEACE, MUTHAFUX

--JL

#305

Gotta chop some lawn. The city says so! Absolutely fucking hate that, but hate will not deter fees and civic action, so, gotta chop some lawn. Haven't had to deal with that need in some years, so my calluses ain't built, which is annoying. Don't make use of gas-powered implements, so things are harder and more time-consuming than they might otherwise be, but overall, this is worth it. Nice to burn calories and harden the body, nice to have a bit of relative quiet and more intentionality about the task. If I am personally swinging a tool and seeing and hearing and smelling the grass cut and fall without the interposition of a motor and fumes, I'm relatively happier, though I don't enjoy yard work all that much in any case.

Picked up a few books from a bookstore, which I haven't done in a long time. Money, you know. Still wasn't really trying to spend a lot of dough, but figured whatever, though. Whatever! I really fuckin wanted some new books that didn't come in the mail. The mail is nice, but it's not the same. So, books acquired since I mentioned it last:

Mail Books:

World Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, 1984-2019, ed. David C. Krakauer

History, Big History, & Metahistory, ed. David C. Krakauer, John Lewis Gaddis, Kenneth Pomeranz

Store Books: 

1Q84, Murakami Haruki

I and Thou, Martin Buber, transl. Walter Kaufmann

Musth, Ashwini Bhasi 

*

It's a very beautiful day. Beautiful enough to chop lawn without too much grousing about it. Think I'll do outside stuff now, and if I approach this keyboard again today, it will be to write in other text fields. However, I said I'd be here today yesterday, and I say today that I will be here tomorrow--praying that it is the start of a renewed period of productivity. The harrowing silence of non-production has been bothering my mind, and a stand must be took.

Peace, universal lovers

--JL

#304

We're going to blame the seeking of neurochemical stability and balance on the lack of posts and creative output in general. Guess also I should admit to myself that my office is not a super great place to write in yet, but making it better seems like too much hard work at a time when there's lots of other hard and necessary work to choose from and also I just want to chill a bit.

Back to to the brain chemistry: it's not strange being off everything, which is the strange part. I mean, because I'm the type of person who invests a lot of energy into the types and forms of bodily, psychic, and spiritual consumption they're undertaking in particular, I am concentrating on vitamin intake, nutritional supplements, and the timing of hydration and exercise with more zeal then when I smoked and drank--weed, tobacco; caffeine, alcohol. Once was a time I would eat a big spoonful of wheat germ for breakfast, have a small lunch at the Chinese place I worked at, and take the rest of my calories as brown liquor and foamy beers, smoking all the day and night. Occasionally, eggs, or a peanut butter sandwich. Didn't drink coffee back then. Started with the coffee in earnest when I quit drinking the first time. I would also drink cans of flavored sparkling water by the case, and smoke my cigs, though I'd left weed at that point as well. Even at points when I'd quit the rest, I'd stick with one; caffeine and nothing else at one point, weed and nothing else at another. But I haven't used nothing, nothing at all on the daily, since schoolboy days, basically.

Feeling fine, but at the same time, there are things I have to figure out how to do and carve the space for again. Writing is the main thing. A better chair, a lower desk, time, better organizing the writing space. In truth, I've done a great bulk of my writing recumbent, which is part of why my laptops tend to fall apart, but that's my most habitual zone. The most important ingredient will be time.

Truly, I am exhausted from merely this small effort. But I will nail myself to the duty of getting another one out tomorrow, The discipline must begin again. 

--JL

#303

Been avoiding writing about much that is topical in terms of world events in the blog for quite some time. Admittedly, been avoiding the blog itself for a little while, which always happens when I move. It is more difficult for me to be productive with writing when my books are not in some form of organized shape, and they are not right now, but there's lots to do each day--and I'm not the best at prioritizing my most private inner needs, even though they're essentially the most important ones. For me. But like, dishes gotta get done. Kids gotta get bussed to school, and bussed home--at least, if I want a paycheck they do. Shit needs cleaning. Etc. All that is more vital to me, these days, than virtual spaces and distant lands. Also I feel driven to record more lush memories in this space, to make it more autobiographical, though this is hard and time-consuming work.

However, I care deeply about virtual spaces and distant lands, and I do read stuff and have my considered opinions. Six years back, in the truly dark times of 2016, my addiction to information and news media of many varieties reached critical mass and I collapsed in on myself. In the time this blog has run I have practiced dipping my toes in, commenting occasionally, largely because while I was not ON twotter, I was still using. Since I quit that mess completely, it has been easier to just get the essentials and move on with my life.

This business in Ukraine is in its third month, though, and I have so many high-concept notions around it, and Russian policy in general, and multipolarity & globalization, the furthered sagas of covid, the further sagas of cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens, and this new Chinese autonomous ship class that went from announcement to reality in a year, business news in all its great variety--all these are things I take careful note of, and think about commensurately. So many conflicts! So much progress, and so much backwards thinking and commentary about it from so many quarters, while the real game runs faster and harder and smarter than ever before! I just drooled a tiny bit.

Whatever it is in me that cares about the big picture, about history in the distant past and history carving itself out in blood right now today and where the twain intermix in ferocious, glorious alchemy--I mean, it's an unbelievably exciting time to be alive. All that really happens in life materially, though, is gas prices are up and I have to put away some laundry. So who really cares, really, truly? I shouldn't. But I do. Is the blog better or more useful when I am writing about the complexities of the now that we share virtually, or when I am waxing philosophical and reporting on the mundane intricacies of my own quiet life?

Anyway, sometime in the next series of days I'll try to strike a balance; post something autobiographical, post something about current events, those wicked, heady current events. Past and present. Innerworld and outerworld. 

Today, I dunno. Think this is all I got today. Felt good to type it, though. 

--JL

#302

Better. Feeling, that is. A little better. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be something approaching the new 100% fitness, sans caffeine, sans anything resembling a vice except a touch of sugar once a day. Suppose some consider video games a vice, but I don't know what to say to those people except most of what you can say about video games, positive and negative, can be said about books and paintings and music and basically art in general. If, in your worldview, art is a negative, your confusion is so total that we won't be able to communicate very effectively at all. I mean, you have to suspend your morals just to use language.

Well, anyhow, I also choose to retain the right to smoke a fine cigar on occasions. 

There's a decent chance that rather than waking up fine tomorrow, I will be awoken by an awful headache which is only tolerable in one single precisely upright sitting position, with my head held at one single precise angle; any deviation from this stasis will cause stabbing, otherworldly pain. It should go away in time for me to start work, but it's not a great way to pop the cork on a day. This happened a few times last time I quit drinking coffee.

Point of quitting caffeine is to give me more time and focus in the early mornings to exercise and maybe write a little. Making coffee takes a long time, being as we hand-grind beans and use a chemex-style coffeemaker. This makes for superior coffee. However, I'm also always torn between looking for more independence and imbibing chemicals as a ritual, but right now, I'm in independence mode, and I'm sick of needing coffee, from having to make it to having to sit and drink it. Rather be doing stuff. It's just not time I want to give to a thing anymore. And the contingencies of dependency always bother me. It's the best way for me to motivate myself to stop doing something--the strategic vulnerability, the weakness of need. Can't rely on cigs for sanity buffering; can't afford it in any sense. Can't rely on caffeine for anything; gotta be able to get up and go without aid, without guaranteeing painful incapacitation if I can't for any reason get it.

Yes, the less need the better. For example, it is time to end this post, because my need for nutrition is interfering with my drive to create. And needs must, dear reader.

--JL

#301

Quit drinking coffee today. Been planning to for awhile, and now it's happening. The attendant headache has been more or less held at bay throughout the waking hours by naps, careful hydration, and pills. 

Don't have much more beyond that, because my brain is behaving more or less like a poorly fried egg. We'll try again tomorrow.

Suppose the only things of value or interest to say today are as follows:

• Was gonna buy a bicycle today, any whatever Huffy or Mongoose off the wall at the box store would have fit the bill. I didn't, though, because petition-signature-seekers in the parking lot made me so upset that I couldn't concentrate on anything. Maybe it's for the best, I don't know. 
• The Shield of Achilles is a good book so far.
• Speaking of books, I ordered a couple, published by the Santa Fe Institute. I'm excited for them. They come tomorrow. They are also concerned with history. Other stuff, too.

Alright! I'll try to do better than that tomorrow, but that was a monumental effort considering how I feel today.

Peace!

--JL

#300

Man! Dude! Dear, dear reader! The time do slip away from a man, and there can be little doubt about that, generally, I bet. Definitely for me, the only time I really felt time moved too slow, as opposed to galloping away, was during high school. High school, such torrid microwaved bull shit that nothing in my life, no matter how difficult or tragic, has ever seemed really as bad. Have worse traumas inflicted themselves upon me, before and since? Yes. Would I rather experience them again three times each than go through high school again even once? Yes. With hesitation, but yes, yes, firmly yes. 

Finished rereading Animorphs, naturally, crying by the end. Now reading The Shield of Achilles, by Philip Bobbitt. 

And that, beloved friends, is all I have time for today! More...TOMORROW!!!

Peace and war and war and peace, beautiful strangers, soldier on in the name of love.

--JL 

#299

Well, it's been a considerable interruption in factually pointless service around here. Goes like that sometimes, unavoidable this time, but I never like it. Me, I like to deliver. Yet, the conditions have to be right--not perfect, but right. My laptop got moved to the new house before I was ready to have it moved, and we didn't get internet in here till earlier this week. Didn't leap at creating this blog post first thing because:

a) it was already begun but unfinished, a state which is not the best for me--I like, whenever possible, to bang these out in one swift torrent. 

b) still working hard at learning the ins and outs of the bus driving gig, and sadly I must report that the training may have covered most of driving the actual bus and a few points of the day-to-day, but it in no way represented adequate preparation for the actual job in its detail, nuance, and code. So learning it has taken up considerable bandwidth, plus they changed my route after a week. So basically I worked two first weeks in a row.

Sidebar: the breakdown is, I love twenty percent of this new job, like/dislike fifty percent in varying measures, not sure about another twenty, and hate ten percent. Not too terrible, but don't know if I'll stay, or if I stay, whether or not I will for longer than a year.

c) there's been plenty to do about the new house and its yard. Plenty remains, of course, but we're living in it now, apartment and most everything to do with it behind us. Excelsior!

Ok. Cool. Cool. You have been reasonably updated, dear reader.

*

Wish I had more to say for this particular post. But we got Kirby: The Forgotten Land as a housewarming gift to ourselves, and really, playing that game and rereading the Animorphs books are most of what I'm up for these days. Having a house is really cool and it feels really good, especially as I'm still somewhat overwhelmed and psychically occupied by the newness and process of it all, job and house changing, life just coming at me, so I'm gonna go enjoy the peaceful, restful things. 

Peace and love, friends, and we raise a glass to posting again! It sucked to be gone most of April, but May will be fun and cool. 

--JL

#298

Well, my test was not a success. Didn't get too far before a silly mistake that I could have corrected failed me right out! This time I had the parking brake on during the air brake leak test, which is no good, and any mistakes in your brake test fail you outright. Miserable! Foolish! Ah, the pain of an actual fail is so much more searing than a practice fail. Well, I can try again on Tuesday, and I have promised the tester a perfect test at that time. And by gum, I shall deliver!

Dang, man, though. Fuck. Would have preferred to pass. That would have been preferable, to me. But, as my tester said basically immediately--everything happens for a reason. I believed this as a child, then I doubted it, then unequivocally held that nothing happens for any reason, and eventually I came to believe once more that every particle in the universe is exactly where it needs to be for all time. I did not proceed with my test and pass it today, and the consequences of that will affect my life and the life of those around me such that years from now, I will look back and say "None of this would have happened if I'd passed my test right away. Thank God. I say Yes to this life with an obstinate joy. Do you hear me, demon? A stubborn, relentless joy, a firm and clear and uncompromising Yes!"

*

Ha! Feel better already. Also, we got plenty more moving done. Still a lot to do, but life changes so fast all the time, and people are always doing everything they can to make it faster and faster--annoyances it may contain, but this slow-burn move has its beauties and advantages, as well. 

*

Ezra just came up to me and showed me that someone is selling my books at a higher price than the one I set. Through eBay! Couldn't really care less about the money angle or whatever. Any angle. Guess I hope they do a better job than me? I mean, it is barely possible to do worse. Also the seller is very obviously a bot.

*

Looking back at this post--and my life--I get the sense about myself as a terrible letdown to my family, especially in times/cultures with exacting expectations regarding the product of family units. I have fun imagining myself falling pretty neatly into the a Japanese stereotype of dudes like me. A disgrace, but not like, the worst conceivable disgrace. A faintly amusing, mostly harmless, embarrassing failure--"Gakkari shita chōnan. So fortunate for the parents that there followed other sons, better sons, sons who did not squander their promise."

Drifter mindset, drifting life. Head in the clouds, buried in books, lost in space. I may have mentioned before that at an overnight camp, I was given the nickname "The Wandering Fetus". And, well, yes. To offset this, I've done my best to work hard and at the very least not be a freeloader or a burden, and tried hard to do right and be a support to those around me, when I wasn't drunk off my nutsack or letting the devil take it all.

So it goes! Peace out and give head, good people. Or don't! Your choices are your own.

--JL

#297

If, when typing it up in this here blank space, I bring up truth and its unknowability a lot, it is because this concept, this question of the truth--and it is a Question--Quest--is the thing I have been thinking about the most, every day, for as long as I can remember. I don't believe I have gone through a single day of this life without asking myself at least once what the truth is, the real Truth, the Supraliminal Immanent capital-T Truth before which all miniscule-t temporal workaday truths are lies. The question of the true nature of God, in other words. My hubris has always been the wish to look upon the face of God. 

Death may show me, or be the starting-point of new stage of the Quest. I'm cool either way. What can I surmise in my lifetime? What does the Question do for me in my lifespan, how does it shape my existence and my being in the world? I'm finding out. Seeing, and at the end, I will see what I have seen. Seen what I will see. Man, is it hot in here? I'm woozy. This form of contemplation has this effect on me. Not vertigo or anxiety--a feeling of my corporeal liquidity changing state. Brain simmering up to a boil. Vascular system filling up with clouds.

*

Tomorrow is my bus-driving test! I've learnt to drive a school bus, and should pass barring I mess up on any of the pass/fail elements which fail your whole deal immediately. On my pretest yesterday I did just that--the bus is not secure at a stop such as a railway crossing even if the parking brake is engaged and the service brake is pressed unless it is neutral gear, and I forgot that gear change, and only that, once--but that's a total fail. I am confident, however, that tomorrow will be a successful endeavor! Mistakes are the greatest of all teachers, their stinging, acrid lessons always the most enduring.

Whole process got me thinking about other stuff I could learn and get certified for, like CPR (one should have this on lock anyway, but haven't been certified since I was a teenager) and, dunno, whatever. Could get more endorsements on my commercial license, for example. Maybe I could learn to drive an ambulance, or a fire truck? So much seems possible now that I can maneuver forty feet and almost five tons. What else is licensed and useful? At what point does one have an embarrassing amount of licenses?

*

Ok, that's that for today. Please peace the fuck out.

--JL

#296

No matter how much I write about internet--its pernicious toxins, its miraculous fruits--its mysteries, lies, and obfuscations--its great telescopic beam aimed everywhere and nowhere--it feels like I hardly say anything. This is probably because I don't know much, if anything about internet, in the end, no matter how much of it I read and experience. It may be like a dream, in that it is an unreality that is integral to the makeup of reality. One cautious observation: its portion of that makeup has grown strangely and of its own properties, like an organism. Or a virus, or a cancer. 

Often one reads what internet scholars have to say about internet and one can agree, while wondering why it doesn't feel like the whole story. I think this is because any one person is only ever writing about a small part of the internet, like someone describing the part of an iceberg visible above the water. The internet is thousands of miles of deep, deep ocean full of icebergs--truly, the net is vast--but typically we zero in on a few peaks when we talk about the whole shebang. I mean, there's trenches down there. Billions of cubic meters of water. Why so much babble about this or that algorithm, or a couple of companies? Because you have a word count on your article. Because books and dissertations can only be so long.

Again, like a dream, writing about them is no substitute for dreaming them, and if there is an art and science to dreaming, there is only so much that others can tell you. The dreamer must dream in order to dream. So it is with perceiving the internet--diving into strange waters to see what you haven't seen before. Fishing for strange fishes.

Most people just hang out on top of one or two of the most enormous icebergs, trusting official reports about the reality of the underwater vastness, and call that the whole internet. Just like most people read an article or three, an introduction, an excerpt, and a short-form analysis, then feel qualified to tell you all about Aristotle's influence on Western thought, or what Nietzsche really meant, signified, and believed, or what effect a needle traveling at lightspeed can really have. These people don't know shit about fuck and can't be talked or listened to by any individual with even moderate presence of mind, but they are legion, and amongst themselves, they reinforce each other and create a certain social reality of perception and sufficiency of knowledge. They cannot be taught further, except by the next fragment forthcoming from their usual sources, which they absorb only to maintain the intellectual capital which is socially functional to them. And in the end, society has lots of functions to fill, and there is nothing wrong with that. We can't all endlessly wonder what the deeper meaning is to every phenomena that we encounter in life, or live as completionists and subtext addicts. People have a busy day to get to, so they'll eat disinformation over breakfast and regurgitate it over lunch.

Of course, this can be stressful nonetheless, but it doesn't really matter any more or less than, say, a giant humanoid insect in your dream telling you that in the crystal caves you just traversed, you left behind something important--yet, you cannot turn back. That is also kind of stressful, but functionally, concretely, you can keep dreaming, shift the dream, do whatever, even wake up. Neither will it interfere with you unduly in waking life, though the memory of it all is something to chew on. Similarly, on internet, it's easy to keep your mouth shut, and click away, or log off. There is more to think about elsewhere, different nutrients you could be absorbing, new and interesting vistas not available above the surface of the water that you could contemplate. 

Internet is supposed to tell us something about the real world; it is even supposed to inform us about reality, but that is not what it is really for, and not what it really does. But what even is the real world in the first place? The iceberg metaphor is equally applicable. 

No one knows anything. It's fun to exchange ideas about it, nice to think about, but far as I can determine, the only truth that has never been known by anyone lies in accepting and admitting the unknowability of the truth.

--JL 

#295

Each time I reread all the Calvin and Hobbes, I reflect upon how precious little philosophic and literary work has ever really done more for me than reinforce and enrich what is contained within its aggregate panels. In his comic strip, Mr. Watterson covers the full human range. It's all in there, and if you don't believe me, read it again. 

Not reading Calvin and Hobbes at this precise moment. Just thinking about it, as one does on a Sunday morning. 

*

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Thank you, beloved domesticated feline, for your contributions to this humble blog.

*

Monday morning, now. I'd hoped to generate more thoughts about whatever in order to feel this entry complete, to experience that round, alloyed sensation of the post being done. This did not happen. Sunday got real lazy. Well, I took some more stuff off the apartment walls and did the dishes, which is not nothing. It's not a lot, either. There was plenty more stuff to do which I did not, and that trend continues even as I type.

The apartment space empties slowly, and the new house fills slowly. We painted our room (two tones of green, for peace and headache soothing) and Ezra's office (his preferred bright yellow, for energy and focus [I can't be long in there, as such yellow saturation tends to give me headaches]). Well, Ezra and his mom painted his office, and did most of the work on the room. I helped some in there. Mostly, I've moved objects, largely books. All that remains in the apartment is the several books I'm reading currently and the nonfiction stacks. My office/bookroom was once some form of giant closet, with a degree of built-in shelving. My plan is to paint many symbols in black and gold and silver on the shelves and flat ceiling. This, combined with all my books, the art to be hung on the sloping part of the ceiling (the second floor is seemingly a converted attic, so our room and the bookroom have that triangular shape upper-story rooms sometimes have) and the objects that can be housed there should make for a room of great power and strong magic. Hope it's the place where I finish all my current projects and many more.

There's so much fucking work to do, though. Transforming the yard areas, fixing gutters, cat-proofing the necessaries, lots more painting, and much else.

Well, It's what life is for and all about,

*

Thinking a lot about old friends lately. Morbidly, you know. How many more will die without my getting to see them again even once? And I'm so underground and off the map that in the large bulk of cases, I don't even know how to contact people, and people have very few options in ascertaining that I'm still alive myself. 

All there is is what will be, and there is nothing in this world to fear, but I can't help but feel a certain sadness around it all. My own fault, of course. Solitude, privacy, and hermitage come at a high price. 

*

Been warming up for a real theological post, real godhead/spirit shit, but that is not this post. Soon, though. 

My practical bus driver test is on Sunday! I better work pretty hard this week. 

--JL

#294

To continue on a bit from yesterday: a wholly disproportionate percentage of our lives are made up of and/or reliant on pure anecdote. The human being has been raised that way, yes, for lack of many better options. We are memetic animals and that's just how it is. However, there is a difference between a demonstrative meme (which can be concrete or metaphorical) and the other kinds, which can be divided roughly into three groups: theoretical (like hypotheses), recreational (tall tales, jokes, and the like), and bullshit. 

Bullshit's alright in sane measure. Fertilizer, y'know. Problem is, as I said, in the proportion. The huge difference between a demonstrative meme--for example: the sun rises in a direction which is one of four cardinal directions and sets in a second, from which the remaining pair can be derived--and bullshit--for example: masturbating will make you go blind.

Well, see, the sun rises in the east. It might not always do so forever into an infinite future, but it's demonstrable for the present, day in and day out. And while you might masturbate, and go blind, no one can prove that there exists a correlation there, meaning that, for the present, to assert causation is to propagate bullshit. 

Because bullshit can sound so much like a theoretical meme, and theoretical memes can sometimes become demonstrated, or seem to be demonstrated, and therefore concrete enough for honest use, bullshit often passes for the truth. Individuals can build whole worldviews based on anecdotal bullshit and believe they are operating on rational grounds, when they are really being manipulated by tricksters, officers of a nation-state, or sacerdotal entities.

There's nothing wrong with that--as I say, governments bank on this to form order from chaos, and it seems tolerable within certain limits--but it can be frustrating, and get out of control fast, because once you believe a little too much bullshit, it's hard to determine where bullshit-eating has to stop. What is persuasive becomes more real than what is true. The truth has no real sales pitch; bullshit has infinity of them and they almost always sound better. Sophistry.

Anyway. All this is to say that we would do well to instill in ourselves a rigorous metric of verification before incorporating any new information into our thinking, and be engaged in a dispassionate vetting process of what we think we believe. Thus, our Socratic thinking, praise God. 

*

Don't know why I feel compelled to try to squeeze these things out on such a crunch time--after waking up, exercising, and making coffee, before breakfast and getting ready to leave for work. But the hours are quite busy after work these days, what with moving books and painting walls/ceilings and whatnot, so I guess they wouldn't get typed otherwise.

Truth is, while I detest working on a deadline, and won't really do it even if I set it myself for some inane reason, I enjoy the challenge of a time trial. Even if I fail, or generate totally idiotic drivel, it's more of a fun time.

Ok, peace the fuck out

--JL

#293

The importance of the divides between experiential evidence, experimental evidence, and anecdotal evidence has always existed. It can be hazarded, and I will do so, that most people's worldviews throughout the winding course of our (from an individual's perspective) vast shared history is composed of utile and applied experiential evidence combined with anecdotal evidence which amounts to a materially invalid but socially encouraged set of opinions. Experimental evidence is a truly rare and expensive gem, and, like the gems we dig up from the living earth, is valued at even more than it is worth. Again, like gems, more people hear about it or see it in the possession of a select few than are able to touch, use, or own it themselves. Again, like gems, many fakes exist, some very difficult to distinguish from the real thing, some enshrined as the legitimate article. Now more than ever. 

Now more than ever. I truly loathe that construction. Part of that loathing is its legitimate applicability.

How much does it matter to a person who will never travel further than two hundred miles away from where they squat on the daily whether the planet is round, flat, or an irregular spheroid? They're not gonna try to sail a boat to wherever the fuck. They don't have to triangulate or plot jack shit on any chart. How much does the exact speed of the planet hurtling through space--or its static majesty as it sits in state at the precise center of the universe--actually affect how you get your next meal, or deal with local levels of precipitation and humidity?

The quality of the average person's life is so rarely affected by what scientists fight about. Well, formerly. Applied sciences have jacked us into a technological dystopia, and experimental evidence is rammed right up our collective asshole. The idea that science might be a conspiracy is reserved for those who literally cannot perform a simple calculation, one that a man naked underneath his toga could do with a standing pole and its shadow thousands of years ago. Poles still cast shadows, and unless calculators are a conspiracy, the math is easier to perform than ever.

This is still not to say that experiential evidence has lost its primacy. Who in the vast aggregate really gives a fuck about quantum computers? Solid-state physics? Learning a martial art, or stonemasonry--there's news you can use. I love science, history, all the nerd shit--love it--but as I make my way through life, I can't help but think that the world consistently demonstrates to me that these are playthings for me and for people like me; that the root of life is very far removed from these castles in the air. What good is an advanced society if it requires and produces extreme unhappiness even for its most lavished beneficiaries, and worse from those consigned to serve them? Some good, but rather less than optimal potentialities. Who is happier than someone with no idea that a new smartphone is necessary for happiness? No one infected by the concept, I deem.

Yet, we bring these castles to ground, force them into the life-root position, and while the case is very cogent for all the wonderful things we have accomplished with this thing of ours of sharing the results of our experiments, the case that life is extremely close to being completely fucking ruined for everyone, human and non-human, is equally cogent. One thing I feel comfortable stating unequivocally is that we moved too fast, too heedless, with too narrow of a field of vision and too linear an idea of progress.

Agriculture was once an experiment. Maybe Cain wasn't the best dude, but maybe he got a raw deal. Ursula K. Le Guin, when writing about the many possible ways once could conceive of and determine what could be classified a highly developed society or civilization, mentioned the possibility of paleolithic technology and a highly developed and communal contemplative philosophy. We have the exact opposite, and I think we're pretty developed, but what we have simply seems less durable in the long run and less desirable in the first place, at least to me.

Well, we'll see what happens. I'm not really trying to make a point or anything. You know how it is around here. 

*

Oh, I guess my point initially was going to be that people are infuriating when they pretend that hearing about proof is the same as obtaining it for themselves. But I suppose that fury is immaturity on my own part. People are gonna do what they're gonna do. A wise man said: to see the truth, discard all opinions. Think I'm paraphrasing several wise folk. At any rate, I should take that advice myself, perhaps moreso than the people to whom I'm prescribing it.

Damn, what a useless post. Sorry everybody. 

--JL

#292

Instead of learning to drive the bus when I was supposed to begin learning to drive the bus, I was caught by the kind of extremely powerful illness that sweeps previously contact-restricted populations when the operant restrictions are lifted. So, I've only gotten to drive Friday and yesterday, but it is worth noting that since I last posted, I have been behind the wheel of a school bus, a wholly unprecedented condition in my personal existence. Kinda cool. Pretty cool, I should say. I like driving, and driving is kind of like a video game, so it's kind of like learning a new video game. Most of the rest of the time, though, I was suffering under the yoke of a particularly miserable head cold, and that just sucked. Didn't even wanna write. Wondered if the negative forces of the universe had sent this illness into my body to prevent me from writing, which is the kind of thing I think about when I am running a low-grade fever. Being sick inflames my superstition and paranoia, as well as any number of tissues and membranes. 

Speaking of all that, judging by what I've been reading online, signs point to another brutal sweep of very bad illness, epidemic/pandemic style, on multiple fronts. Should...do my health insurance paperwork. Probably. Should...restock my supply of immune system supplements. 

*

Welp! I'll try to generate something interesting next time, which will be soon, maybe this evening. That's all I could reasonably squeeze in between waking up, getting nutrition and coffee, and having to soon depart for more bus driving.

Peace!

--JL

#291

The emotional landscape I find myself traversing, brought about by the work on the final post of Album Week 2022 in relation to the content of said post, is hampering production in general, so the thing to do, I deem, is to continue work without a set drop date. The seventh and final post of Album Week 2022 will be posted when it is finished, however many posts down the line that may be! Bam. There. Decided and declared.

*

Dear reader, as Ezra has recovered from his top surgery--or, the careful and intentional removal of his tits--we have watched so many movies and cartoons and documentaries. I mean for real, the number is so silly I daren't even attempt a list. Forcing myself to keep fit amongst all this reclining media consumption and sympathetic convalescence has been a true effort, a test of discipline to which I have not always risen to my own satisfaction! His compression wrap is off today, though, signaling a pretty much complete recovery, and we can now enter into renovated and refreshed life patterns. 

We are going to move into a house, which my parents bought and shall rent to us until we can buy it off them. Since my brothers got college and cars off 'em and I never did (largely by my own choice), I have decided not to feel guilty or ashamed about this situation, though it is my personal inclination to feel both of these things and also to wonder perpetually if we are not all of us making a mistake we will live to regret. But! Forward, forward, ever forward! Gonna concentrate on being able to paint the walls how we like and put nails into 'em so we can hang pictures properly, and to be able to do whatever we want with the backyard. That is all I can do. In addition, after we buy it, which is another thing to concentrate hard on and expedite, everything will be square.

Passed the commercial driver's license stuff, got my learner's permit, and have fully completed my classroom requirements, so Tuesday I begin learn how to drive a bus! What a trip. A fucking school bus, yo. I mean damn. Had very bad times on school buses as a kid; hope to provide a very, very different experience to the young people placed in my care. 

*

When I was in kindergarten, or kindergarten-aged, I wet myself on the bus. I mean I pissed my pants, but like, hugely. Remember it as a kind of seizure. Held it pretty much from the moment the bus left the school to being dropped off at my apartment building, and about halfway down the aisle, dreaming of blessed relief, either the waterworks must have come to an internal realization that it was down to letting loose in emergency vent mode or busting a gasket, or the mental impetus holding back the flood relaxed prematurely at the sight of the finish line. Whichever, the result was I twisted, twitched, and jerked my upper body, hands scrabbling uselessly at my lower body, feet rigidly planted and breath locked in my breast, face an agonized rictus as I urinated into my short pants with such force and reserves as to soak through them entirely on both sides, the bottom of my shirt, and create a puddle which ran up and down the little trenches in the flooring of the bus's aisle. Too stunned to feel the force of shame, but desperately sorry for the bus driver, I squelched off the bus, socks spongy and warm with runoff.

Took a huge shit in my pants around that age, too. Just one of those situations where I didn't want to go, at psychic odds with the needs of my body, and suddenly, without warning, holding back was no longer an option. Wars of attrition with biological functions are doomed from the outset, but children don't know that yet. At least, children whose arrogance and mania drives them to read in bed for as long as humanly possible without even the smallest of pauses, shitting be damned.

Boy! Life is certainly a phenomenon rich with experience. Things just happen, and we keep on truckin' along. 

*

Celebrate your bodily functions today, everybody! And as always, walk away from this blog with the ineradicable sense that control is a pernicious illusion.

Peace!

--JL

p.s. Finally realized that my basis for changing the blog's font in the gap year from whatever the default is to Verdana--which was that I had thought I was using a different font, before, and maybe I was? And then blogger took it away? Maybe? It's so hard to know things for sure without reliable and durable reference points. Anyway, the whole blog is now set to the default font, which is better. I don't know why I was using Verdana. For some reason, I thought I had to. That's over. Praise the Lord.

#290

Album Week 2022's final post continues to present research and layout difficulties. In addition, adjusting back to even the concept of the working life is strange and tiring terrain. Gotta to go to take a test today in order to secure a commercial driver's learner's permit with endorsements so I can learn to drive a bus so I can take a driving test to get a commercial driver's license so I can drive a bus. The whole concept, plus the pending weight of responsibility for the well-being of children, is starting to bring forth the classic esteem problems that, if not carefully addressed, tend to lead into quitting entirely. And it is a bummer to let half the hoops put you off when half the hoops have already been jumped through. Therefore I must summon deep reserves of character and determination, and no one likes doing that. Digging deep? Plying fortitude? Ugh. 

To top it off, as always, there is the part of me that always wants to only watch cartoons, and nothing else. The toxic and monstrous evil of daylight savings time is also to blame.

*

In the good news department, I ate a very big plate of shrimp 'n rice with andouille sausage yesterday, preceded by fried calamari. This felt like it did my brain some real and measurable good. 

*

The second editions of my earlier books aren't showing up for purchase anywhere that I can find them. I don't want to deal with this problem! But I'll try. Later this week. Maybe Thursday, maybe Friday. Tomorrow is some days before the day before my brother's birthday, and we are doing a thing, after which I will need to watch some cartoons, and after I take this test today I am going to--hello! Watch cartoons. Yes indeed. Work on other writing projects and the recovery and transcription of old projects is ongoing, but secondary to cartoons at the moment. Also gotta plan on moving, which is always so much energy. So much cost to the body and mind. But it is into an actual house of our own, and hopefully will be the last move for a long, long time. Have moved domicile nine times in the last twelve years. Tenth time pays for all? We pray.

Ok. Gotta shower for class, I guess. Haven't missed sitting in a room for hours under fluorescent light watching educational videos, but this experience should refresh my empathy for schoolchildren, so there is that added value to the mandatory learning experience.

--JL

#289

Too many tabs open on two separate browsers. A sign of increasing hubris, which will almost certainly result in downfall and remorse.

As a safeguard against this dark future, for once in my life I am dedicating myself to making backups of all my work. Wow! Really hitting my stride, here, in the computer age. In addition, I have worked hard the last few days in smacking together new editions of my first two books, meaning all four of my books can soon be found on my author page! The first editions are still available on my old author page, but maybe amazon will take that down now? If a single organism from that company would ever deign to contact me, perhaps something concrete might be decided, but all my efforts result in ever only more screens with remotely applicable instructions at best, and perfect opacity the rest of the time. 

Been tapping away at work that I had presumed lost, and I've got the old notebooks out and have been transcribing analog work. This, combined with the work that (I pray) shall be salvaged from my wretched macbook, should mean fresh delights on the publishing front in due time. Finishing that last sliver of a percent of a book always seems to take me as much or more time than composing the entire rest of it, but process is process.

* 

Once I start getting paid for driving a school bus, I plan to start buying computer parts, that I may finally build a safe and stable computer which stands a chance of serving me as computers ideally ought. My bus driver training begins today, and at some point during this process I shall secure a commercial driver's license, which is fun. Air brakes! Gonna learn what those bad boys are all about.

Recycling center job didn't play out because they have no evening shifts. Oh well. Seemed cool, but I must admit, the building and area pretty much stank; like, smelled bad. Carried an odor. So the disappointment factor is pretty bearable. I'll keep a pin in it nonetheless. We may be moving soon, so perhaps an evening job nearer to the new neighborhood, which is in a different township, will be findable and suitable and workable and etc. Or perhaps it's for the best in general, since school bus driving may offer more hours than I currently perceive. Won't know till it's really happening and factual, after all. Finally, perhaps even at this stage, after all the background checks and drug tests and fingerprintings, the bus driver thing might somehow fall through, in which case I will certainly run back to the center and take that job instead.

*

Read recently that optimists live longer and age better. People think I'm a pessimist, but that is only because I am devoted to realistic views; in my heart and soul I possess an incurable jouissance with an apparently immovable faith in the absolute perfection of the universe. Even if the world has already gone to hell, shit, and fuck, and nothing will protect me or anyone I love from a painful and functionally meaningless death, my feelings about it all remain hopeful. I think optimistic outlooks are stupid, but optimistic feelings are justified. No justifications for this beyond feeling that it is so. Guess I could point to some philosophy about it, but why bother? If you'd rather sit in your shitty diaper about how bad life is, fine. Savor the flavor, and apparently, die sooner. 

*

Ok! Bus driver class pretty soon. Time to eat toast and shower.

Album Week 2022 wraps next post, but it may be awhile. It's serious business, this post I have chosen.

--JL