#278

One of the more fun things about aging, at least in my own particular fleshly vessel, is how every time I scratch my eyebrow, I come away with three to five eyebrow hairs. My eyebrows have always been pronounced, and if when I am well and truly ripened, they are Gandalf-level--sticking out beyond the brim of my wizard's hat--I shall be well-pleased. 

Also my scalp is insanely dry. Incredible. Buzzed my hair off a few weeks ago and the sides of my head were densely matted with dead skin. Not greasy sebaceous offal, just...accumulation. Been slapping jojoba oil on my head after every shower and the situation is much improved, but if I don't do it for a few days, the itching and flaking resumes. Some people have suggested I use coconut oil instead, and maybe I will. There is a certain logic to it, hermeneutically speaking.

Plus I have decided that the thing to do is to start shaving my head. Embrace the dome.

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Before jumping into my main thrust, I would like to say that I was stuck on the Journey Mode of this newfangled Tetris I mentioned and quit playing for awhile. This one level, Hula Soul, is quite fast and exacting, and a block developed around it. Couldn't hack it, got frustrated and left the game alone.

Because the Nintendo Switch is such a wonderful machine, I hadn't felt the need to touch my handhelds--my DS's and Game Boys--in about a year or so, except to raise six Dragon-types on a Pokémon Sun runthrough. I was idling at my desk instead of writing a few days ago and pulled out my old Game Boy Color (yellow) and popped in my ancient Game Boy Tetris cartridge, which I have owned since I was eight. Playing this ancient version of the program liberated my thinking and reminded me who I am. Beat Hula Soul first try after that and kept on going. Fun stuff. Tetris rules so fucking hard. Someday, when the current whatever the fuck is over and something resembling a functioning society is allowed to resume, I hope to visit the local arcade and play its hallowed, venerable Tetris machine, which has already given me many happy hours. Once upon a time I was up on its high scores, and perhaps I can get there again.

*

Factually Pointless didn't update at all in 2020. The last posts of 2019 were made on computers at the downtown branch of the local library, as discussed in said posts, and the leap from where I was in November 2019 to where I was in February 2021 was of such acceleration and distance that I have felt completely unable to summarize. Even the events of 2021 as they happened before I lost my job seemed too swift and fluid to properly chronicle. I was going to buy a house on two separate occasions; neither panned out. Now I'm planning on securing funding in order to shoot a movie, a project I have not embarked upon in about fourteen years. I know how, though, and since I seem unable to properly engage with the concept of returning to work, and shooting this thing is all I can think about (besides writing and the other shit I like to do and think about) I mean to pursue this task relentlessly. How does one come about roughly thirty thousand dollars to make a movie? I guess step one is, figure that out. 

Anyway. Back to the past. 

*

December of 2020, I had come to a point in my work with upper management. My employees were being abused, on top of being underpaid and overworked. Our union was doing fuck-all. So a few days after my last post in 2019, I took up union stewardship and all that it entailed on top of my regular duties, which were intensive, as half the kitchen including the head chef and the former union steward had quit because of management (not that I was upset to see the back of any of them at this particular juncture. Better than those folks had quit at previous junctures, many due to to the people leaving at that time). This is why the blog took such a backseat, at least at first. Didn't mean to take such a hiatus, but I made myself responsible for everyone around me. 

Sadly, I cannot recommend this. Do what you gotta do--I would do it again, if I felt it necessary, as I did--but expect the opposite of gratitude and advantage. 

Another reason I haven't written about this stuff is that the purpose of this blog is not to suck my own dick in real-time. The facts are this: starting in December, my friend J (who rose to the occasion to serve as alternate steward and supported me throughout the whole ordeal) and I organized the employee body and made the union serve us to the effect of renegotiating a union contract that established a higher wage rate increases in said wages for personnel based on length of time worked. Along the way, we managed to expel the most toxic member of management by getting together a document that would have led to fairly severe litigation if they hadn't taken the belated action that they did (pretending the guy was leaving for his own reasons). I also started dating my husband-to-be--casually, not even as a primary partner. He was dating and living with a mutual friend. More on that in a moment.

This all took us through March of 2020, and two weeks after this, news around COVID was serious enough that I decided to close the kitchen down (for me, eyewitness account from a friend that the state capitol where they were at had literally boarded its doors shut was the tipping point. Don't trust the news, but when someone whose eyes you have looked into reports directly from input into those eyes, that's actionable). I personally had to make this decision because my direct superior wanted to, but didn't feel safe from managerial retaliation, and as I had just shown that they couldn't stop me from doing what I felt was right, it fell to me. Donated as many perishables as I could to charity and distributed as much as I could to staff, froze the rest, and sent my people home if they wanted to be there. The workplace did not close at any point.

Two weeks after I shuttered it, the lockdown order came down. Next bit's kinda traumatizing, but that can't be unusual. Anyone thinking back to the beginning of lockdown and the ensuing weeks and months probably wants to shy away from those times in their mind. Luckily, detailed recounting is not at this stage necessary. I could expand the preceding two paragraphs into literally hundreds of pages worth of tellable events. Whole character arcs. Same with the paragraph after next. But the post will be quite long enough without going into detail.

First, my husband. For the purposes of the blog, we can call him Ezra (for said purposes, I've not used someone's real name unless they specifically asked me to, and even that I've gone back and changed, because I don't think it prudent to use anyone's real name anymore). I am nine years older than him, and we worked together for a year preceding and during the first couple months of our relationship. That doesn't sound great, and I felt weird about those particulars for a while. Don't anymore; the age gap is the same as the one between my own parents, and close to the one between his parents, and we've been married for well over a year. Also he had dated two dudes plenty older than me before I even met him, and lived with one of them. While we worked together I was so focused on professionalism and being a decent friend and resource and role model and, later, boss, that I never even allowed the possibility of seeing him as a sexual being in relation to myself come into play for over a year, and a whole lot of walls had to come down before we ever even touched. I mentioned him in the blog before I ever mentioned my last ex-girlfriend, whose part in the blog seems terribly exaggerated to me now and also unfinished, since I never addressed that we stopped dating (still friendly, it just sort of fizzled out--painfully for me, not such a big deal for her, but a good learning experience for both of us). Ezra is the coworker that lent me Everywhere Disappeared, the Patrick Kyle book I so adored. He is trans, and his tits are coming off in five days, which is pretty cool. He is also pretty cool. Cool enough to marry.

Ezra was crashing at my place the final couple weeks before lockdown, because he was going through some shit personally what with a nervous breakdown and extreme manic energy, plus irreparable relationship issues with with Aiden, our friend with whom he shared a lease at the time, and because our other partner, Deyas, is a person who really needs their own space regulated a certain way. Lockdown made our situation semi-permanent but also fraught, as Ezra is much more a social animal than I have ever been or could be and his friend Orli and her boyfriend, an old school friend of mine, Augustine, required sociality as well. We went along as linked households for what would prove one fucked-up shitride with these people and an orbiting cast of characters, a tale which merits a whole novel. Dead serious. Let me hit you with a word-cloud-type non-sentence to partially illustrate what went down: spray paint I don't do cocaine but of course do what you want some motherfucker ran over the dog bloody handprint on the window lamb's brain soup dude was doing way too much ketamine we chasing every sunset we fucking can top of the parking structure Nat Shermans bonfires gathering up all these SPIN scooters for the fuck of it blasting playlists out the speaker just like old times don't normally ever drink this much yeah well welcome to the club this is fucking unprecedented this isn't even an actual business plan the dude is cheating on her where is the money even coming from you really gotta tell her what happened before he tells her because if he gets ahead of you on it it's gonna be bad you should tell her today you oughta clear your head fuck man it's so hard to breathe I feel like I can't do this anymore but I feel like I can't stop do we contact emergency services do we know anything about his mental health history yeah I heard some shit but this is worse how many times are we gonna have to talk to the cops going back to Vermont well he's in jail for now where did all that money come from do I get myself a handgun or a new computer look I'm not going to testify one way or the other damn that's some good shit like remember back in the day look at that fucking sunset man none of this is even real I known you a long time no I don't blame anyone for this what the fuck kind of person are you really I don't know what the fuck feel like I'm losing my mind do I even know him it's like he doesn't listen at all let's go buy some candy Costco vodka made in America hahaha you don't understand what it's like living with the pain of this a mismanaged society crumbles A MISMANAGED SOCIETY CRUMBLES I think losing the dog really pushed him over the edge this friend group has become gross and incestuous come on let's just walk away just let her walk away I think I'm done giving a fuck all we can do is do our best and be honest probably it could have been worse probably I could have prevented this probably everything's gonna be ok.

Around when everything calmed down and wrapped up, I got the call back to work, as the case numbers were dropping. Magical realism with hyperdark twist interlude over, practically on cue. The perfect timing of everything is always so unreal. Did not do cocaine (I have never done and never will do cocaine; I have this unfounded but extremely powerful conviction that if I ever do, my heart will pop like a balloon) or ketamine or whatever the hell else was getting passed around, or take a drink. Did smoke probably more cigs and weed more continually than ever before in my life, which is saying a great deal, plus shrooms when they were around. Thankfully, no one was hurt at any point, at least physically, except Augustine, who did it all to himself, and he's alright. He's one of those dudes that's always alright. I pray I was able to exert a steadying influence over what could have been much worse, but there's a lot I could have said and done beyond that, and living with that is just life, I guess. Ezra also kept it pretty much sober, but the rest of them all went pure hog wild with all the shit they could grab, and after we broke orbit with them, their utter collapse was not long in coming. Arrests, vacating the state, I don't know what all else. Broken windows, shuffled lives, profound remorse. Someday I'll tell you all about it all.

Work now consisted of just me and my boss, which involved my acting as his psychologist and reality anchor as well as doing more than my fair share of the actual work. This too was a situation that spun out of control eventually, but I think I handled it and the fallout much more elegantly and responsibly than the preceding interlude in life. Ezra and I moved into the current apartment, we got our second cat, he got a job at the local library and started going back to school, and we got married. That was the best part. We also took a few trips, which was neat. Then I finished and put together Broken Arrow, Laudable Marauder, which ignited the old bloggin' chops once again. 

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There! You're the quick and dirty version of caught up, dear reader. As I have said, there is so much more to tell, and I will tell it by and by, dear readers, as I intend to make this a very prolific year for the blog. 

And with that, we must put the seal on January. See you next month.

--JL

#277

In fact, this was written some years ago, but I deem it requires little if no tinkering.

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I was very excited to see real live horses. It would be my first time, and the pitch of my equine fever sustained me all the unbelievable span of the drive from Caracas to Los Llanos. My parents had arranged a stay at a finca out somewhere in the flat vastness, I don’t quite remember, but far from home, way out — not as far as going to the Andes, a reasonable ten-hour westward shot to Merida, or the truly long drive southeast to Canaima, past El Tigre, past Ciudad Bolívar, fourteen hours at least out to the realms of cloud and cascade— but long, especially for a little kid that had just gotten really into some kind of horse-racing cartoon and was writhing with constant anticipation to meet and ride one straight into a glorious, lifelong friendship marked by gallant adventures and dramatic triumphs.

Horses are phenomenal organisms, but they are not cartoons, and I was somewhat disappointed that there was no unbreakable bond secured upon eye contact, no profound and immediate understanding between fated partner-souls. I was very deeply, existentially disappointed, but I played it stoic; or, a three-year old’s version of stoic: wandering the hallways in unsmiling silence, running my fingers wistfully along the walls, and staring deeply into the liquid emerald of the half-full, algae-choked swimming tank by the side of the house, shadowed by low trees with long, waxy dark leaves that would drop heavily into the thick water.

Sometimes I see a very young person evincing a very particular solemnity, bathed in a ghostly, personal prevailing light, something ancient showing in their youthful features, and I remember how strange and quiet and terrible it was — those first few times reality had its graceless way with a powerful fantasy.

Each time I had to, I walked about ten feet away from the tails of the line of horses, tied to their long hitch, for I had been warned of their propensity for kicking, should they sense me within range, and been assured with due intensity that this was likely to result in my gruesome death. I felt ashamed of myself for my childishness. I looked down the row and pictured their skeletons, remembered the pages in our Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Ancient Creatures devoted to their ancestors, pictured my head smashed open and my blood spattering the fine yellow dust over the hard earth.

Pretended I liked the white-gray dappled horse best, because it was the closest in appearance to the white horse in the cartoon I liked. I gave it the same name as the cartoon horse, because it was something I had planned and was following through with in order to punish and console myself in one stroke.

Red howler monkeys would be calling, sonorous and mournful and immediate, long before the roosters engaged their gravelly shrills. They had me up before dawn each morning, and I began to go out onto the porch to try to get a glimpse of the monkeys, who sounded as though they were calling from the nearest branches of the copse of trees a hundred feet from the door. The old rancher told me they were calling from far away, that they were too shy to come so near to where men and horses lived. His son was old too. I do not remember what we ate. I was at an age when I would, given the choice, make a cheese sandwich or buttered noodles my meal three instances out of three; perhaps I even still partook of some formula with the nipple on the bottle.

The younger old man, the son, led me to the horse and placed me on the saddle. I felt unreal, emotionless — there was a kind of huge, reptilian fear at being suspended, twice, thrice, over and over, saddle over cloth over hide over muscle over bone, the nearness of an alien will with whom there had been no communication. I forced it down and followed directions carefully. I wanted it to stop, but I stayed silent. I had come this far expressly to ride a horse. To turn back would be babyish; worse, it would be rude, or, that most cardinal of all sins, ungrateful.

Relinquishing control of a situation has been a core part of my survival skillset for so long that it has assumed the sort of reflexive pride that constant use lends certain tools; one forgets that one ever existed without the tool, the incorrect and frustrating episodes before the tool came into one’s life seeming to have occurred to some other hapless caricature. It becomes embarrassing and feels unnecessary to remember a version of one’s self which was at any time unprepared to devise an exit strategy, unable to sauteé minced garlic and onion in shimmering fat from muscle memory, or daunted by the challenge of building a structure to safeguard the structural integrity of a raw egg, using only toothpicks and bonding agent.

Discernment! The mark of the civilized animal. I could not tell, at the time, how the old man could know that the monkeys were not nearby, invisible in the darkness, the density of the foliage. I had not heard one up close.

Stars at night, out there on the equator, hundreds of kilometers from any city — they made the world like a dark postage stamp, my body a distant little stem, the stars and my head fusing and swirling, a boiling explosion of blooming light, frothing hypercolor sailing, chorused roaring. Sometimes my mom would have to clap hard and scream my name to call me back to the world. Even years later.

Drank a draft of milk fresh from the cow, watched the hand coax it from the udder, watched it squirt into the pail. Tilted my head back and felt the warm slide down into me and set off a firework in my brain.

Out there, folks ride huge white oxen where the cracked hard land turns into a swamp, beasts with huge, backwards-sweeping humps on their backs, above the shoulders. Like riding a rolling marble mountain, your hands on the foothills, your head the eagle in a tight gyre.

Out there, what was fictional and expected, constructed, mythologized and made digestible, retreated in the face of what was real and incomprehensible, inconstructible, indigestible, irreducible, asymbolic, and therefore, protomythological. The cartoons had lied to me, yes; but the contradiction was far more unreal than the false premise. There were more dimensions than I had processing power to grapple with; the suggestion of more than stars hiding behind the vault of the night sky. A mystery that would overpower any myths that would make it soluble and finite; I sensed this, but could not process it. Put simply, I wondered, without language, what lay beyond heaven, and sealed my fate.

Out there I learned to begin learning the difference between what is learnable and what is true. I got to where I was able to ride a horse all by myself. Time morphed and split and shivered, and I thought about Orpheus and Eurydice as I spilled a little water in the dust and followed the trickle to see how it ran.

It was dismemberment, and it was reintegration. I saw my dead body on the ground, watched the standing water hold the rot, felt my living body with my fingertips, set water free upon the thirsty plain, amused the grownups with my good appetite and odd questions, pretended I was a ghost, stood more alone than I had ever been in my life and was penetrated by the Void.

Told the old men about how thin little Old Man Lightning shamed the Jaguar, proved he was stronger than the roaring, mighty jungle cat. They had heard the story before, of course, but laughed and praised my telling.

What matters is the telling. Fake, real; it’s all in the story. Lightning does not make noise. What sounds across the plain is the air superheating and exploding, not the lightning itself. No power can be greater than that which cannot be fought, that which exercises no will, that which desires nothing, cannot be prevented, foreseen precisely, touched.

Yes — true power is to be nothing, yet greater than all power. Immediate as death and as remote as heaven.

Only energy obeying itself unto entropy. A flash in the darkness, then nothing.

What does the flash illuminate? That’s the question, and the answer to it.

Of course, we cannot but be both, in most cases; the flesh and claw and panicked mortality of Jaguar and the inviolability and supernal prowess of Lightning, that Promethean Flame which illuminates and destroys.

When we got back to the city, back to our apartment on the ninth floor, back to my little playskool table with my little playskool chairs, I fell into the habit of sitting and looking out the window at the mountain that rose above the city to the north. I could stare out the window from my bed, as well, and began sleeping badly. I would concentrate as hard as I could on how it would feel to not exist, to “be” the sum of the components and materials that made up a car, or a fence, or a pane of glass; how it would feel to have your engine fire and to be the oil that ran through the mechanism, to have light pierce your molecular structure nigh-undisturbed, to be the photon slightly jostled by the glass, the pebble rolling down the mountain path, the shoe on a horse, the lightning rod.

To possess something other than my own body.

To eventually wear away to nothing.

*

Some style issues abound here that I prefer not to allow into my work these days, but there you have it. 

--JL

#276

Oh hey, post 276! That's alright. That's ok. 

Before I lose the gumption yet again, let me actually finally finish a couple thoughts from earlier this year, which is just earlier this month. Hardly seems plausible that time hasn't crawled out of the first month of 2022, but it is so. Being out of work makes the time stretch beautifully. Punching someone else's clock really is a blatant theft of life. Watched so many movies lately. Average three a day.

Should also clue you in on a bunch of shit about my life that I've been putting off. The importance of the autobiographical aspect of FP is something I go back and forth on a lot, but at the end of the day, people like to know who's in their ear, to a certain degree, and I don't know how else I would accomplish an autobiography. Unsurprisingly, due to my massive hubris, I've been trying since I started writing seriously as an eleven-year old, but the effort is unsustainable as a single document or even a series of documents. Unless you count this blog as that. To my mind, this isn't My Struggle, and I'm not some Norse guy, though we both love Borges and Calvino and clearly we have some of our worst problems and characteristics in common. 

Anyway. January thoughts.

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SHIT I THINK ABOUT CONSTANTLY

Probably the best thing to do in this case is to go back and edit the post for increased exhaustiveness. Don't typically like to edit and might get really long, but it chafes me to leave so few things up even though it's plenty and also communicates essentially nothing. Can't fix being an obsessive fuck when it's the cornerstone of your personality. Probably it's time to go back and update my full list of sins, too. Been awhile.

Good example of how things are: for no particular reason, a few minutes ago, I caught myself thinking about Kevin Spacey's body of work. Just thinking about the many different scenes in which, for example, he's lying shirtless in a bed; sometimes with rose petals, sometimes with burn scars. Why? Why was I running comparisons and thinking about what it means for the viewer, what it feels like for the man? I dunno. It's just what I do. Relentless art brain. Constant subjective processing. What is the difference between a young Kyle MacLachlan shirtless in Twin Peaks and a somewhat older shirtless Kyle MacLachlan in Sex and the City? The gaze behind the camera? Actual changes in muscle development? Why do I care, or mention it? Who knows.

COMPUTERS AND THEIR PROGRAMS

Thought there was more to say--thought I had forgotten to include some games, or whatever. But I think I covered the bits pretty well. That was just childhood, though! On to the teen years.

The advent of the new millennium saw the home PC become a Hewlett-Packard. After Windows 98, Windows operating systems started to suck pretty bad, and I think computers started to suck around this time as well. Was not fond of the HP the way I had been fond of the Compaq and Macs. Windows XP was, compared with what came after, ok, but certainly it had within it the seeds of how bad shit could get if not corralled, and no one could ever corral Microsoft--look at what they do now. Look at what they just did, at the time of this writing. Don't even want to talk about the shit they buy, redefining the significance of the phrase "purchasing power". Someday soon the CEO's of Disney and Microsoft are going to have to physically fight each other to the death for supremacy, a battle which presumably will boil the oceans and turn the moon red. Christ will descend and break the continents with an iron rod, and we will at last know peace in the sweet oblivion of world-death.

Disliked the iMac and the new operating systems that Apple made. Somewhere along the line, possibly when went it all went from being known colloquially as Macintosh to being known as Mac or Apple, something got lost forever. I'm typing on a MacBook now, and it is what it is--you can't rewrite history--but it's not a choice. I picked the machine that caused me the least pain, out of a swarm of hostiles. Mostly I like its pink color. The iPod was cool if aesthetically ridiculous, and then they killed it by destroying everyone's life with their phones, lozenges of increasingly concentrated evil. Proof: the phone ate the iPod. You can call that streamlining. You don't wanna know what I call it. Bitter, eccentric words from a bitter, eccentric jerk. Like my computer itself, my relationship with Apple Music is a shackle of least suffering.

Never been a console war or PC war type of guy. I use everything, play everything, Sega, Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Apple. So I feel I can objectively address the fact that it's all the same gain and loss. Pick your poison, the bartender says, and regardless of the taste of the brew or the feeling of the drunkenness, the liver takes it all the same. Cells and molecules.

Anyway my first laptop was a craptastic battered ThinkPad my dad had used for work for a couple years, which he let me use when I turned twelve. Not to be thought of as mine, like, he could take it back anytime if need be, which is a trick my dad loves to use. Used mostly as a typewriter to furiously generate my first novels and short stories, novels later shitcanned, short stories unfortunately lost when the laptop failed. I also looked at webcomics and did research with it, as I do with all my computers. Then I got a Compaq laptop for my sixteenth birthday, on which I rewrote and shitcanned the same novels, generated more lost short work, and my early poetry, most of which survived because I finally got into semi-adequately backing up at least a portion of my work. This laptop was eventually--seven years eventually-- destroyed by use, and I used my brother's discarded first-generation MacBook for a couple years till I was gifted a Black Friday deal Toshiba for another birthday. This lasted a couple years, right up to the beginning of the blog and the generation of my first books, until it selectively destroyed all my files twice. You'd think I'd have learned to very vigilantly back the fuckers up, but I don't. My trusting nature, always at odds with my paranoia, typically wins out when laziness is added to the mix. Also I seem to be unable to properly internalize that tech only gets worse, though I make the point often enough.

Now it's a MacBook Air, and it has indeed broken twice in the same way. Only owned it for a little over a year and a half. It's also already obsolete, and it'll probably break permanently soon enough. At that point maybe finally I'll at last comprehend the simple truth, which I have known for decades--only a fucking idiot buys computers. I need to build my own or die.

HATRED

Let's not.

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OK! Ok ok ok ok ok. Tomorrow I'll tell you a story from childhood. Hey, you know what? Do you one better: I'll just make post 277 right now.

Take care, dear reader.

--JL

#275

Started and deleted this post a couple times. Something about being a quarter cent away from post 300, which feels like the most important milestone in the life of this extremely obscure, sans-readership blog. 

Also I have no serotonin in my brain, probably. Probably less, probably some kind of serotonin neutralizer instead. Been weeping a lot. No joke. Took one of those drives, those "I need to get the hell out of the house and be alone GOODBYE" drives, and just cried like a baby for a quarter tank of gas. Doing my part to accelerate the end of the world, I guess.

Many times over the run of this blog I have recommended the smoking of weed on the daily. Know that if you personally choose to take this advice, and ever want to stop, the physical kickback will be a return or surfacing of many aches and pains in the body, and all your buried psychic trauma coming up to kick your fucking ass.

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Also, don't take my advice. I say so, over to the right of this text field. Read the disclaimers, please. 

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What else is there to say? Everything I've said in this blog that I might have once thought of as insightful was written hundreds of years ago. I say that the universe is made up of metaphors, metaphors, only fractals and metaphors, thinking this is fertile and new, and later find that Jorge Luis Borges said it better. Anyway anyone that's ever done enough LSD or hit the DMT could tell you the same no problem. 

Whatever. Who goddamn cares. I have laundry to watch and crying to do. Certainly I shan't be the first to point out that there is nothing new to be written under the sun. Probably I've already said it right in the blog. 

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You know what I've been watching a lot of lately? The Marvel Cinematic Universe. It's no more than I deserve. Also finally watched the new Twin Peaks. It sucked. I loved it, but it sucked. I love David Lynch, but he sucks. Thanks for reading my opinion today. Thank you. Bye.

--JL

#274

Quit smoking weed, because it's not a good expense to bear when you're out of work, and because my throat was starting to seriously kill me even if I took like three hits once a day. One is not meant to draw the same from the same well for one's whole life, so, it's ok. First smoked weed when I was sixteen, made a habit of it around eighteen, smoked regularly in my early twenties, less so in the middle, and starting about 2016, I smoked every single day, as many times as I could, basically. Also, consumed it, and applied it topically. 

Been continually high for several years at this point. So, things are a little emotionally fragile at this stage in the game, and y'know, it's not easy. But it is bearable. 

Yet, in the spirit of acknowledging this, and of full disclosure, and in the interest of getting it off my chest, I'm gonna steer the ole H.M.S. Factually Pointless (am I the majesty? I won't overanalyze this) into the Negative Waters that I try so hard to keep her away from. Often over the course of things, I have failed. Yes, the blog is often uplifting and affirming (kinda? I hope) but I acknowledge that sometimes I'm kind of an asshole.

Well, I'm much worse without weed. So it goes. I have mentioned that I am an alcoholic. A dude doesn't drink and smoke the way I do because they are transcendentally balanced. 

Anyway.

Just want to say that for all that I have ranted and raved and torn at the flesh of my face here in F.P. about twotter and facebork and yootoob and the other ripe devils of our shared online existence, it is nothing, nothing at all, compared to how fucking goddamn badly I FUCKING HATE TKTK. OH MY FUCKING GOD I HATE IT I hate I MOTHERFUCKING ASSPISSING SHITCOCKING HATE THE FUCK OUT OF IT OH MY GOD THE HATE IS LIKE AN ANIMAL IN MY CHEST CLAWING TO GET OUT AND THERE IS NO FUCKING RELIEF. 

Don't even know what to do with this level of hatred. Don't know where to put it. It is radioactive material and I don't even have rubber gloves to handle it with. 

Thank you. Please, convince your family and friends to stop looking at tktk. It is the worst thing that we have done to ourselves as a species in a long and brutal history of rape and genocide. I can't even be awake right now I hate tktk so fucking bad. Ok. Good night. It is not yet six p.m. Good night. More on how huge my hatred is, how it dwarfs me, pathetic mortal that I am, later. Ok. Good night. 

--JL

#273

All right, dear reader. It is post number two seven three and we are going to TEAR IT UP by which I mean FINISH SOME POINTLESS THOUGHTS FOR NO REASON. Perhaps it would be more precise, as well as more linguistically refreshing, to say that we are going to AIMLESSLY PURSUE SOME INCOMPLETE LINES OF RECREATIONAL REASONING. But whatever we choose to call it, here were are, and here we go.

*

You know? Actually? Why look back. Perhaps it would be better to simply move forward? If the reasoning is recreational, and the thoughts pointless, will "completing" them be worth anything? Is that even possible, this notion of completeness, of completion? Would hazard probably not. Certainly it is difficult, at the moment, to remember what value proposition I thought existed in such an act. 

Yes, I think everything behind me will take care of itself. Perhaps already has; perhaps what I felt was unfinished was perfect and entire. Sound integers all the way down. 

Ultimately the concession that it is all without thrust or pierce--directed towards nothing and lacking any point--furnishes me with the kind of plunging-ahead, animalistic glee of process and lunatic self-confidence that allowed me to print my last book without so much as rereading the full document a single time. Guess I get kind of a kick out of doing stuff like that.

If the thought is worth writing about and reading, it need not truly be concluded. Also, too much of life necessarily consists of second-guessing hindsight. "If you look back, you die," Zangetsu tells Ichigo. Bleach is, indeed, about striding forward bravely through the rain into a bright future.

In that spirit, we shall enshrine that first paragraph as a worthy step, even as we step beyond it and leave it behind us forever--just like the two hundred and seventy-third post.

--JL

#272

Ah, it's been a while since we encountered a number as good and perfect as 272. A real winner, in my opinion. The smallest amount of prime numbers that add up to the next prime. Beauty, eh?

So much beauty in this universe, and we hardly see or conceive the most infinitesimal fraction of it even collectively as a species all through infinite time, let alone individual perceivers in our own lifetimes. Tiny dreamers in an ocean unfathomable--subatomic particles in the surface layer.

We do not even feel the turbulent momentum flux. We do not feel how we float in a peace defined by the passing music of an almighty wind, sea and air composed of light--everything ultimately light.

One of the names of God: El, which is--Is, and every light, all light, omnipresent light. 

Just light. Every consciousness in the universe a light-recording machine made of light.

Astonishing, the concept of how necessary literally everything is, how totally and completely everything in creation needs to be. How essential our participation, however wayward or unwilling, in this infinite wholeness of which we are such an indispensable microcosm, containing infinite microcosms, part of macrocosms which are microcosms in their turn unto infinity, unto a great Radiance; a Radiance which gives infinite light and loses nothing of itself.

*

Cats be screaming for attention. Wanted to revisit each of the topics of this past year, but so it goes.

Peace, peace, PEACE BE UPON YE

--JL

#271

A UK company made a role-playing game called Disco Elysium a while ago. It looked very interesting to me. Couple of days ago, or just yesterday--hard to be sure--I got it for sale as an "out-of-work-sad-sack" present to myself (so far, I have failed to properly schedule an achieved interview to become a school bus driver [because phones are stupid and everything to do with phones is stupid and everything that involves a phone in the ordinary course of its being-in-the-world is severely compromised by a great and voracious stupidity] and am working out the details of an interview to work at the local movie theater downtown) and the game has, indeed, been interesting.

Interesting fuck. Interesting completely consuming my brain how will I ever get free. Monsters wrote this fucking thing. Prancing devils. Thank God for them.

*

Watching Twin Peaks for what must be the seventh or eighth time, but only the fourth time I've had access to all the Log Lady intros. It's good; when I'm massively absorbed in the dense minutiae of the aforementioned works, the overwhelming, heavy, bitter draughts of dense depression I am currently imbibing are more or less lightened on my tongue. I am okay with being depressive and am pretty good at performing at least three tasks a day and generally surviving while depressed, which means I've lived long enough to be depressed a lot, which brings me to the point: it's a bad one. Yeah. No joke. My tide is at a low, low ebb. But doing quite well, considering. Taking care of chores, keeping busy. Showering adequately and brushing my teeth. 

*

Encanto is the best thing Disney has made in years, maybe ever, and I really like a lot of Disney stuff. The vitality in this thing is just insane. The beauty of it, the savor. Colombia is such a neighbor to Venezuela in all things that never in my life have I experienced such a total familiarity with everything on the screen and coming out of the speakers, even though it was fantastical and magical in more ways than one. Beautifully, brilliantly written. They did very well. They got it good and made it right.

Hey, look. I don't like loving Disney stuff. Shit just is what it is. They got me and continue to get me. Let that say what it says about me. Fuck whoever has a problem with it right back.

*

Been too depressed to give my soul to reading. Does sometimes happen that the particular weapon the depression wields consists of leaving me unable to approach books with my usual fervor. This is grim stuff, since books are so helpful and shore up the self so well, but games can, as I have often stated, mind the gap; and at any rate I can say that I have been pecking slowly at a couple things:

The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: a 21st Century Bestiary, by Caspar Henderson (this book is so damn fucking good damn damn it is hot shit)

You and I Eat the Same, essays and information by and from a bunch of people, put out by MAD Dispatches (MAD in this case being a Danish food nonprofit), edited by Chris Ying, foreword by René Redzepi

*

Haha anyway depression lol

--JL

#270

Felt like something special might happen for this post, and when thinking about what it might be, it struck that announcing that I had recorded an album might be nice. So I laid down about 32 minutes of track in eight sections using GarageBand, named it scratch clock valley, and that was that. Working on getting it on some form of service that is linkable and functional to whomsoever might be interested. Right now it's on my own Apple Music, and nowhere else. Maybe I'll figure out how to put album art on it. Maybe I'll be able to fix the track order. Maybe it can be on the service for people to download, or I can figure out how to make a Soundcloud. But if I can't do these things, it really doesn't matter.

Here's a tracklist, just because I'm happy with the names I assigned to these simple tunes, and the aesthetics of a tracklist are extremely important to me:

1. wobbly master ghost punch grief combo

2. exuberant penitence phantasmagoria

3. toughest part of the skull

4. matchstick pick

5. soft moss dissolution

6. heedless spiller

7. Buteo Tenken #7

8. "bonus track"

*

So! Down to the meat of it. 

Today I went to a Kroger with my husband and was violently reminded that I am so antisocial without the orthotic of cigarettes that I have actual fight responses to everyone I see sometimes, which is why I try not to leave the house except to walk extremely fast. The mask thing with covid has made it all even worse. I comply with mask stuff, but I hate to, and I hate the masks. I feel like everyone is waiting for the right moment to assault me, and why wouldn't they. This is anxiety I am familiar with from pre-masks, but so acute with them that I am having trouble maintaining self-control.

Consciously, I know that rare is the individual that would fuck with me at all. Nothing ever happens. My muscular armor and spiritual pressure are extremely powerful, as is my eye contact. I just absolutely fucking loathe being perceived. 

Ok peace if you stay the fuck outta my face

--JL

#269

Oh, depression. Oh, the will to death. How does one say it in German? There was once a blog of invented words for real feelings. I will search for it now. 

*

Ah, yes. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Seems it is not only text onscreen, but a hardcover book, which reached that bestseller list published by that main newspaper. This is very cheering; I fully expected to find nothing but vague references and one of those shell websites trying to direct you towards buying fake plane tickets. 

Anyway, depression, but sometimes something weird and fantastic and necessary and, INDEED, obscure, does not vanish in your wake like so much else, and stays. One of the counter spells that makes survival in the face of depression and existential angst possible and durable.

Idly but consistently thinking about durability these days. The concept, its applications. Nothing concentrated, many wide-ranging and useless thoughts. This is my favorite kind of thinking. Doing my favorite kinds of thinking instead of the more practical varieties is another thing that makes surviving depression possible. 

*

Losing my computer to its own lack of decent durability, software and hardware-wise alike, and being unable to replace it when it breaks or transfer the contents to a new box has been a real fuckin problem in life. It's happened once during the course of this blog, which I touched on in due course, but that was merely the latest chapter in a whole sordid section of the JL Encyclopedia. 

Ugh. I am not deleting that last sentence in order to try and teach myself a lesson.

*

The first family computer I can remember using was a Macintosh Quadra, no idea which and I really don't want to talk to my folks about jack shit right now so who knows. Definitely a Quadra model, though. I played Kid Pix and Thinkin' Things on that machine, and nothing else. The years were 1993 and 1994. The builds of those computer programs were fucking badass back then; later versions of Kid Pix always felt too smooth to me, like they'd taken away a cool toy and given me back something similar in shape but covered in padded foam. It's who I am as a person, clearly; most people think internet has actually gotten better. Either I'm just a retrograde lunatic and have been since I was a baby, or almost all originally cool shit has to get warped and ruined beyond all recognition in the direction of stupidity verging on intentional evil due to, I don't fucking know, the influence of Ahriman. I didn't even need to look at a single frame of the so-called Cowboy Bebop "reboot", "remake"--whatever the fuck they wanted to call that organ of cultural rape--to know the score.

Thinkin' Things aesthetic and gameplay got worse with the next version release and I couldn't look at it anymore. Forced to leave childish things behind and having rehashed the material within Mega Math Blaster, The Hunchback of Notre Dame game from Disney Interactive, and Reader Rabbit 2 to exhaustion, I moved on to Duke Nukem 3D. Guess some people played Oregon Trail or something at that age, but I had kind of a fucked-up childhood in some ways. 

*

Aside: my contemporaries and I went straight from Lincoln Logs and that ancient phone toy that made a cameo appearance in Toy Story 3--you know the one, the original Fisher Price Chatter Phone--to computer programs, and we were the second or third wave of kids and teens on internet. I don't think my parents, or anyone's parents, were prepared for this event in childrearing, but almost every one of my contemporaries, even the stupidest pieces of shit, were smarter in key ways than their parents by incredible margins, even the scientist parents. It's just how we grew up. From this we may derive that my own offspring will process me as hyperefficient biofuel before they turn eight, and that's just evolution, baby. Up the children. May I be utilized in order to be surpassed by significant margins in every metric.

*

The next computer in the house was a Compaq Presario, which makes plenty of sense. It was the mid-nineteen-nineties and we had just moved to the U.S.A., and Compaq was first among equals in the PC revolution. I have no idea what models the computers were at the computer lab in my first U.S. elementary school, but they were dependable and very usable machines. I started to learn Python on those computers; that great little turtle.

Woof! History truly is crazy. Look at computers now! The ubiquity, the gleam, the power! I miss those gray boxes designed by those Texas Instruments men. I miss that they whined like jet engines and got hotter than the devil's taint just to read a CD-ROM. I miss only pixels, no one even imagining the concept of the Retina display I'm looking at as I type this (hilarious that retina gets capitalized automatically in this context. Someday, in the future, we will not be able to publish a single thing in "our own words" without auto-signing a dozen agreements about how they're not our words, they are a company's words).

At my Catholic school later in the nineties when we had moved back to Venezuela for awhile, the computer lab was outfitted with IBM PC's from 1981 or even before, I don't fuckin know. In this case, when I say PC, I may not mean personal computer, but the older conception of portable computer. If they read floppy discs, that was a recent breakthrough at date of production. I remember the point of the class was to make them process typing into word display and perform input on very basic equations. The screens were uniformly black and white, expressing only straight lines.

The next year, back in the 'States, they herded me into the computer labs at the more upper-crust elementary school where I did fifth grade and I was confronted with serried ranks of pink iMacs. I don't remember what they tried to teach us, if anything. This gave me much to think about, at the time. 

Dude, the mouses on those iMacs sucked, in my personal assay. Fancy lasers my ass.

*

My first internet thing was visiting the Animorphs website for the games and blog and boards and chat rooms (the chat rooms were too rich for my bandwidth, but I read about them elsewhere). A heady time, these early internet message boards for teens, and of course, snotty little punks reading above their weight. The Scholastic website, to which the Animorph's website naturally swore fealty, was a pretty good website. You could market, but you couldn't sell directly or monetize advertisement yet, so the content was mostly just good and descriptive stuff about kid lit and intermediate lit and all the other literature that's better than Literature. Plus, when it came to the flagship titles and series, interactive stuff crafted before online interactivity carried the price of your immortal soul, like the Animorphs flash games.

Oh yeah, triple-A Flash games, in the times well before Flash games could pop up and steal your data after you managed to shoot the monkey or whatever the fuck, which was well before actual quality FG aggregators or the recognized quality of stuff like Puzzle Pirates.

*

Remembering shit can be fucking exhausting. I guess that's Classic Aging, folks. It gets to feel like so much stuff happened, how could it even be true? Certainly there's no way to remember. World memory--durable? No. No, all this could easily be gone and forgotten again, and a new world of men might rise higher than we ever managed to over the unseen ruins of this near-failure of ours. Those humans might never look down, never know that we were here, except in the origins of their oldest stories--tales of a technological godlessness cast down for its reeking hubris.

Yes, I am saying that we are Atlantis 2.0 and we are obviously a worse and shittier program than Atlantis 1.0, which dovetails with my earlier observations concerning programs. For whatever that is worth (less than zero probably).

*

This has been Computers Day here on FP, I guess. Next time I'll try to finish this and talk more about whatever I talked about last time, but you know how I am, dear reader.

Be well, and be good, be virtuous and true, and if it gets you nowhere and you get fucked over and killed, at least you'll be in happy company.

--JL

#268

Well, it's the new year. 2022 is quite a number. I was born at the tail end of the eighties, almost 1990; to my parents, the year 2000 was the distant future, but I was eleven years old the year 2000. Now, and only now, have we reached year numbers that sound as space-agey to me as 2003 did to the author of Achewood on the morning of that year. It tracks; he was thirty-two or thirty-three at the time, and I am thirty-two now.

Yes, I think about Achewood literally all the fucking time, in all kinds of weird contexts applicable mostly or exclusively to myself. A friend of mine does the exact same thing with One Piece, and never you mind whether you know it as well as he does (placing you in a firm minority worldwide, by my lights), liked it but don't remember which pirate ate what devilfruit or uses only kicks in combat, or even know what One Piece the fuck is--my boy will explain at length, for as long as it takes, until you understand what he means and why he made the brain connection he just made or until you walk away from him. He is also like this about Dungeons and Dragons.

Me, I can be like that too. Specifically, about Lord of the Rings, Achewood, Star Wars, Legend of Zelda, Pokémon, Twin Peaks, Bleach, and Sopranos. Also, Mountain Goats lyrics. These are the fundamental pillars of my cultural being, and I can connect their payload to anything in the world, so far as I know. Deeply autistic about a lot more stuff than just those things, way more and very varied, but those are the things I can always thought-step over to at any given moment in a single effortless motion. Technically, also Jesus Christ plus the Word and Immanence of God, but that's like, superluminal and supraliminal and not really subject to what I'm talking about here. It might be more informative to discuss runners-up and materials which are very very nearly in that top-tier zone, such as Jurassic Park, Animorphs, the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Gabriel García Márquez, Charles Bukowski, Kurt Vonnegut, Ursula K. LeGuin, James Baldwin, and a dozen or twenty more, why not; bestiaries scientific and mythical and other books by naturalists, A Song of Ice and Fire, Halo, Dune (Frank Herbert books only, and also, other books by Frank Herbert), Unsounded, Ancient Greek, Roman, and Chinese classics, fairy tales and myths worldwide (special mention to King Arthur), buncha superhero shit, the other works of David Lynch, and for fuck's sake all of this shit is too much and no one cares. I choose to end this paragraph here, and move on. I'm into a lot of shit. This barely touches comics, or nineties cartoons. 

An exhaustive list of the shit I could autistically and realistically talk about for hours could drive a regular person fucking insane. In ancient times I would be considered nothing short of a madman, a wizard, or an alien. That's just how brains are, mine and everybody else's. Some people's brains make them suitable only for statesmanship, or physically torturing other people, things which would drive regular people, to varying degrees, fucking insane. In modern times, we are all insane, and therefore suitable for a wider variety of roles with less meaning and durability than in properly organized societies.

There is no need for me to discuss any of the material extant in the preceding paragraphs with strangers for entertainment or clout, since such discussions rage in my subconscious eternally and satisfy me tremendously on a personal level. Don't need to win about it at anyone, though I'm of course happy to talk about it face-to-face with people who want to (never online, never, ever). The complete selves in me which have recorded every scrap of information I have ever been exposed to about the underlined material and related interpretative material constantly grow and give input to my ur-self about my life, other creative works, the world at large, memetic generation, everything. It would be fair to state that my opinions and ideas relating to these topics are, speaking concisely, developed. And, still developing. The process will end with my death, maybe. If it does not, I will be quite well-pleased to carry on indeterminately. 

*

Good digressions today, dear reader, good mental flexibility, but getting back to the fact that it is a new year, I have to go do life in it, and there's more than enough words in this post. Maybe I'll do that thing where I finish talking about what I started talking about in the next post, and maybe I won't.

All I know is that we are in another year and anything fuckin goes, baby. Who knows what'll happen. Only the Good Lord and the wargamers, know what I mean? 

PAT YOURSELVES ON THE BACK BITCHES WE DID ANOTHER LAP

ONE MORE LAP

ONE MORE LAP

UNTIL THE SUN EXPLOOOOOOOOODES

--JL