#326

Probably the nicest thing about getting up super duper early even when I don't have to leave the house at six in the morning is listening to the birds wake up and do their morning dispatches, or paeans to their avian deities, or self-promotions, or community catchups, or hate speeches, or their art for art's sake, or whatever it is they're warbling and chirruping about before the sun comes up. Love to hear that stuff. 

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Maybe you're wondering what kind of music I've been listening to lately! If so, today is a present just for you; today, the universe has rewarded you, and you specifically, with precisely what you crave, what you long for in the cold watches of the night. And who could blame you for these harrowing needs? To try to live one's life in ignorance of what I play in the car to stave off transit madness is to languish in a darkness far from God. I also play music when I do the dishes.

That's the when of it. The how? A bluetoof speaker, because our hatchback's audio system is not functional. Sometimes, with the dishes, a boombox, to play CD's. 

Now, finally, the what.

Carpenter Brut's first album, Trilogy, has seen some play, as has The Protomen's The Protomen. SeZon's remake of the Metroid Prime OST is quite good. Taken separately, Kimya Dawson's album Thunder Thighs and Aesop Rock's Garbology have made their rounds, especially Thunder Thighs, which is probably my most-played music lately; taken together, as The Uncluded, their album Hokey Fright has also been "spinning", inasmuch as albums can spin through a streaming service and in a telephone. Kimya Dawson's other albums have also seen action of late. Traditional and Folk Songs of Yugoslavia, played by Branko Mataja, brought me great pleasure. 

Finally, deserving of their own paragraph, The Movers have brought me such joy and lightness of soul that I seriously considered printing pamphlpets and making time to hand them out on street corners, courtyards, pavilions--wherever the public blood courses, that I may infuse it with Glad Tidings. 

Seriously, in my head, I was composing lines like "Did you know that music has healing properties? Have you ever imagined a world living in a sustained and glorious harmony? Please, take a minute to listen to The Movers, and once you have, tell a friend. In this simple way, we can contribute to a new era of peace and prosperity on our beautiful planet."

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Ok! There is a lot for me to do for school right about now, but I'll try to make some more posts this week. Maybe sometime this spring deliver a fresh book, finally, finally go from ninety-five percent complete to one hundred. I keep saying it, in hopes that it may encourage the thing to come to pass. 

PEACE


--JL

#325

Let me preface this part of my post by saying that it's not like I think democracy is so great or that I think governments that are not democratic are helmed by gibbering rats. I know enough to know that everything is different everywhere, and that the underdog is not always necessarily the hero simply virtue of opposition to a power that is clearly oppressive. However, I will always be out in favor of more freedom as opposed to less freedom, and Chow Hang-tung, formerly of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, is sentenced to jail along with a couple of others, and what she had to say to her judge resonated with me enough that I'd like to quote her here, not something I have ever done and not something which will happen often.

“Sir, sentence us for our insubordination if you must, but when the exercise of power is based on lies, being insubordinate is the only way to be human,”

Regardless of the context, I can get behind this statement. I too have bared my neck to punishers in this way, for this reason. 

Personally, I would love for China to relax its more authoritarian policies just enough to, I don't know, be considered human. Also for genocide to stop would be awesome. It would also be super optimal if the U.S. could stop treating China like an entity whose behavior materializes from nowhere and try for a less racist perspective on exactly why their government behaves the way it does, reformulating its diplomatic efforts with that knowledge at the fore. I truly believe the possibility for an entente with China is real, culturally, economically, and politically. It would be an amazing start if western powers didn't expect China to merely sit, and heel, like some canid perversion of a superpower, and obediently produce all the stupid plastic shit they want to sell to their citizens.

When reading policy and intelligence reports regarding China, and when listening to economic cross-talk about China, I always find that the size of the country warps and shifts based on the speaker's prejudice. When they want something from China, it's a small place, like Bulgaria or some shit--just so happens it's filled with factories, only factories and nothing else. The acquiescence of the "third-world" is assumed, and when China does not meet these expectations, a truculent and baseless animosity on their part is to blame. When the speaker wants to conjure some devil with which to fight shadow wars, then China is as some alien race, poised in their planet-shattering dreadnoughts, waiting only for the calculation of their firing solutions to be complete ere their red lasers set our own meek and innocent world's atmosphere ablaze. 

Wonder what the dialogue would look like if we modified our notions and expectations just a touch towards the sane and rational. 

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Anyhow! Peoplefortheworldwideabolitionofprisonssaywhat

WHAT

what

--JL

#324

Dear heavens! The crushing silence of nonproduction! It howls without sound. Well, a lot's been going on, completely apart from apocalyptic ice storms that left us without power for four days straight. Let me tell you, we got off easy. 

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Been on break from school this week, and even this blest reprieve has not filled my body with gumption and celerity. Indeed, I've mostly been sitting. Got plenty of work to do for school, but I haven't moved on it one bit! Nope, just sitting and looking at comics. It's high school all over again, sans consistent and actionable erections.

We got bigger micro SD cards for our Switches, so I spent a lot of yesterday archiving, moving, and redownloading games. It's all on the giant new card, with seventy gigs to spare, and my old card lies empty and waiting for new harvests in a neat little case for them that Ezra found online, reminiscent of a green puck-style weed grinder but instead containing two rows of very tiny slots. And sooner than sanity or reason would deem appropriate or healthy, it may well be necessary; the new crop of Resident Evil games, new Zelda, more Kirby, and a host of other shit I'm extremely interested in are all clamoring for my attention. Most of these games aren't out yet, you understand. But they exert their wicked magnetism on my brain nonetheless; Tears of the Kingdom in particular is poised to destroy my life and I can feel its tonnage hovering above me like a certain celestial body in certain other Zelda game.

Wistfully, when withdrawing the tiny little wafer of potentiality from its plastic chrysallis, I remembered the end of my time in high school, when I was looking at external hard drives, expensive affairs, expensive because they had recently been designed to store a whopping fifty gigabytes of data and released to the bleeding edge of the consumer market. These days, I would expect a hard drive of comparable physical size to hold all recorded human achievement, including DNA libraries. No one even sells a product anymore that holds only fifty gigs--even a pen drive has to hold triple that to be worth pricing dollars. I used to swap a two-gig pen drive back and forth with my ex-girlfriend so we could share music. This represented a huge leap forward from being in middle school, when our age group was mostly stuck burning CD's at each other. This new micro SD card of mine holds two hundred and fifty-six gigs, which is about a hundred and forty more gigs than all the music I had accumulated by the time I left high school.

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Boy, mentioning high school that many times sure left me in a position where I have to tell a story from high school, basically! Strap in. For a story from middle school, though.

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Thinking about this one lately because it's such a juicy cut of how being on the autism spectrum can ramify into your life and you can remain unaware of it for years, even more than a decade afterwards. No shit, you can be a grown man, going about the business of men, and suddenly realize, "ah, no, that was a perfectly readable and even extremely plain interaction, and I was fundamentally unequipped for it."

Also known as "oh, wait--I was the weird one after all. I was the weird one this whole time."

Invited to a birthday party by a girl. To begin with, I did not fully understand what this even means, nor did I realize it was something to which I might want to devote a few thought-cycles to. I didn't know her very well, we had a couple of classes in common. What this means, in practice, is not that she wanted to be friends, or was trying to be friendly, which was my interpretation at the time, nor was it the second possibility in my mind--that a criterion of presence was in use, such as, inviting everyone in one or perhaps a certain few of her classes. What this truly means is that I was included for a specific purpose, indeed, a machination. Ignorant of this possibility and thinking nothing of personal wants or possible gains, I merely accepted because it would have been impolite to refuse.

Showing up on time, bearing a birthday card and some nice chocolate from Venezuela as a gift--another piece of evidence bearing the stamp of my total naiveté--made me the first person present outside of her closest friends, who had of course been there all along to help her set up the party and prepare psychologically. Prepare psychologically for a Teen Party held by American Youth, something I really had absolutely no experience with even tangentially. The Animorphs didn't really go to teen parties--their narrative was taken up with somewhat less idyllic concerns. There was one pool party, but two of them were there as mice and the party was destroyed by a massive extraterrestrial beast. I digress, but so that it is understood that this was the piece of culture that had furnished me with the absolute most context for what I was about to experience.

It is understandable--I don't look like how I write. I don't look how people expect an autistic-ass nerd to look. I write, and perhaps it would be fair to imagine a kind of grub, hands ensconced in those carpal tunnel things, with no hair growing where my headphones constantly press against my scalp. Instead, because of genetics--my parents are very beautiful--and a penchant for taking care of my body, I look like I should get laid at parties. I have healthy head of hair, symmetrical features in fair proportions, etc. So, again, it is understandable that people would try--before they knew any better--to get me to parties in order to fill out the party's general sexiness quotient. I can't help that, and believe me when I say I take no pleasure whatsoever in typing it out. 

In this case, no sooner did a certain other girl arrive at the party than she made a beeline for me. I was already sitting on a couch, totally alone, fully ignored by the hostess. The new arrival, a girl from my advisory class that I knew from elementary school the year before, put a song on the boombox and sat next to me in such a way--how shall I describe it? She wasn't bad at it. Her posture showcased the length of her legs, which were folded up onto the couch with her knees almost touching my thigh, her torso turned on the axis of her hips so her breasts, such as they were, were pointing directly at me, with one arm behind her, and her face slightly turned away while maintaing eye contact. It's not how people usually sit, is what I'm saying--it was a calculated posture. Most people reading this can probably infer its purpose. This didn't really register with me at the time. Rather, I wondered if she was accustomed to sitting on couches or if perhaps this was one of her first times. 

See? See how things stood? It would never in one million years have occurred to me that I could ever be the oblivious idiot, which is part of how I so often was.

The song she had put on was "What's Your Fantasy", by Ludacris, featuring Shawna. 

"This is my favorite song," she said silkily, looking directly at me.

"Yeah?" I responded, utterly nonplussed.

"Yeah. I just love the words so much."

Listen. The song is literally, without preamble or disambiguation, about wanting to lick someone from their head to their toes and asking about sexual fantasies, presumably in order to fulfill them with alacrity. Not real complicated. I have never been made of stone--quite the opposite. I knew what sex was, and I was anything but immune to the allure around the concept. If she had sat down and said "Joseph, you are attractive to me and I want to explore our budding sexuality. I want to make out with you and feel your hands on me," I would have been like "Yes. You too are attractive, that sounds both pleasurable and educational, and I am one hundred percent up for it."

That is basically what she was trying to tell me with the tools our culture and her socialization had made available to her, yes--I see that now. At the time, I merely thought that she was trying to convey cultural information about herself and her taste in music, to which I didn't really have much to say--I primarily listened to movie soundtracks at this point in my life. I think I might have told her that. She pretty much left me alone after the song was over, as we had listened to it in strained silence and then I told her that it was a pretty good song, I guess? 

Most of the party I spent right on that couch, receiving an education in the popular rap stylings of the early aughts while everyone else danced badly and socialized happily, saying absolutely nothing about anything that grasped my interest. Didn't even really want to eat or drink anything they were serving; I suppose if it had been the kind of party where illicit alcohol was snuck, I would have gotten drunk. This probably would have changed the trajectory of my social life radically. As it was, only when they finally got around to showing 8 Mile on a big television did I make the bold and radical move of switching couches. The movie was also very educational, in its way.

Homegirl never came onto me again. Unless I missed another couple instances, who knows.

Next week, at school, the birthday girl and her best friend cornered me to ask why I had gifted her such shitty chocolate. I told them there was no way the chocolate was shitty and they assured me that it was, a bad texture, bad on the palate. I told them that it wasn't the kind of chocolate you chewed vigorously, it was the kind you let melt in your mouth. They looked at each other, then at me like I was a space alien, then walked away without saying anything else.

people are so weird, I thought to myself.

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Before I release you from my eldritch, thrice-cursed grasp--lo! Books I have recently purchased with nowhere to put them and totally cognizant that I should not be spending the money they cost. I buy prunes from amazon, because that is the place that has organic prunes to which no sugar has been added. Prunes are very good for the body. Less good for the body is dying of exposure because I can't pay my mortgage, but most times I'm on there for my healthsome prunes, books tend to get added to the cart. It's like they know all of my weaknesses, or something. The psychic puncture and resulting bloodshed can be wallpapered over by telling myself they'll be useful for school. Some of them, anyway.

The Nonexistent Knight, by Italo Calvino

A Small Place, by Jamaica Kincaid

Not-Knowing: the Essays and Interviews, by Donald Barthelme

Regarding the Pain of Others, by Susan Sontag

The First Idea: How Symbols, Language, and Intlligence Evolved From Our Primate Ancestors to Modern Humans, by Stanley I. Greenspan, M.D.; and Stuart D. Shanker, D. Phil. (One of my favorite books about brains ever!)

The Art of Cruelty, by Maggie Nelson

The Aeneid, by Vergil, translated by Shadi Bartsch

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BAM! KAPOW! FUCKIN POSTED!!!

--JL