#319

Looks like I was being a jerk yesterday. Guess I was cranky. Guess when I'm cranky, maybe I pick on an illustrated image I generated myself of a technically disadvantaged-type dude. Today I get to feel guilty. Today I ask in all seriousness, without venom, who cares about not being able to do push-ups? Who gives a fuck about pants. What the fuck do pants, or how a person smells, have to do with their innate worth and infinite spiritual potential? Do their opinions and their affect as a subculture or stereotype mean that they deserve my snide excoriation? 

No. Not at all, dammit! The best thing that can be said about my outburst may be that it was fundamentally born out of frustration at my inability to help this kind of person, but that's not my job, or my problem, so what the fuck, man. Really stupid stuff. Gotta be better than this.

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Anyway. Fucking hell. Let's talk about books. I'll finish The Wars of the Roses today or tomorrow, and then I'll kill three birds with one swift and terrible stone by reading the textbook for my current poetry class cover to cover, thereby preparing like gangbusters for that class, fulfilling the "poetry" checkmark on my "next book in planned alternating sequence", and also still pretty much reading a nonfiction book, what with all the hard data and background and terminology and other crap that fills textbooks so dang full.

That reminds me to mention I have been reading psychology textbooks and humanities textbooks, which means, when it comes to the latter, a bunch of stuff about art and history and culture and anthropology and law and economics and also like The Epic of Gilgamesh (but a condensed, prose form, for economy's sake--not very satisfying but still good) so that's nothing but rad. 

Makes me happy as a pig in shit, to tell the truth. I decided to take only classes that would please me greatly if I properly apply myself, which is decidedly my firm intent, and so far it's paying off. Those classes have been a lot of fun to be in and do work for, even though it's a lot to deal while working and keeping a house together with and it's only ever going to get more intensive. I am prepared, though, in body and brain. Feeling strong. Getting back into the swing of the endeavor and determined to, for once in my WRETCHED ARC, excel without getting a complex about it and throwing my life in the garbage.

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Listened to all of Mega Drive's discography a bunch. It was so fucking awesome to do that, damn that's good music. The synthwave revival fellates my soul with such pleasure it should be illegal. This music ought to be a controlled substance.  Also the newest album from the band Alvvays is very good. Listened to it because John Alison, the former Scary-Go-Round (currently, Solver and Giant Days and maybe a few other things; formerly, many many comics including Bobbins and Bad Machinery) man and great delighter of my eyeballs as far as comics go for the past twenty years, put up a list of albums of the year, which he does most years (I don't always see it, as sometimes I have been off the grid or distracted or whatever), thereby delighting my ears as well. Before that, a bunch of Bleach soundtrack music, made by Shirō SAGISU, finally got put on iTunes, and I was listening to it a lot. Before that, the Andor soundtrack, which is a magnificent achievement both on its own and in the context of a Star Wars endeavor. Before that a couple of playlists I tinkered with for weeks, full of all manner of music new to my rotation and reliable classics. Before that, a massive playlist containing all my favorite blues, funk, soul, and low dirty honkytonk jazz music, which was all I wanted to listen to for weeks, only occasionally breaking form to check out A Hawk and a Handsaw or Vetiver or listen to some Mogwai albums. I'm listening to Lazerhawk's Skull Shark as I type all this.

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Wow! Who cares about any of that shit! Maybe sometime soon, by the grace of the Almighty, I might come up with a thing or two that is actually of use to anyone. Tell a story. Have a thought. Something. Anything that isn't me just blathering about the things I like, even though, of course, people like that sort of thing. Me too, when someone else is doing it. Doing it myself, it's some weird completionist compulsion; I look up and there's just this ridiculous wall of text describing what a fucking loser I am.

--JL