#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