#331

Oh no! I've been putting off the last post of Album Week 2022 until post #333, and it fast approaches! This is terrible! Not ready! But I must be ready. It is essential that the post be dropped on #333 and no other, and I can't just take a hiatus right now--feeling extremely productive lately and wanting very much to put a lot of posts into the blog this spring and summer as well as finish and start some books, so I will simply have to screw my courage to the sticking-point and plunge headfirst into the deep end. Literally and metaphorically and literally within the metaphor! You'll see what I mean when we get there, dear reader. Water, and plunging--will we sink, or will we swim? 

That is what is known as a teaser.

What is the sticking-point of courage, I wonder? Is it the nipple on the left side? Your right hip? Up your own ass far enough to plant it in your guts? This bears long consideration. Courage a threaded thing, made to fit a threaded hole in the body, or the spirit, and hold fast. Does its mere presence do the job thereafter, or does its function as an affordance require further manipulations? You know, like a strap-on. Or, I dunno, a crank.

Perhaps we all have our own unique sticking-points. Perhaps many sticking-points, for many varieties of courage. I get my artisanal, shade-grown courage at the stupid fucking farmer's market, and it makes me feel super good about myself. I put it in a reusable cloth bag before I take it out and casually but conspicuously screw it to my extremely obvious sticking-point.

That's an example that occurred to me just now. Suppose we don't have to respect every kind of courage, even if we're obliged to acknowledge them when we see them in our effort to appraise the world with honesty.

*

Thinking about openly carrying a pistol or other high-velocity projectile weapon, as is so prized by certain types of individuals in this vast, strange land of ours, these nominally united States. More like federally linked conditions, but those aren't the hairs I'm here to split.

One reason I would never carry a gun is I just don't like them, but even if I did like them I don't think I would carry one openly because of the very simple reason that to me, carrying a gun is a clear signal that I want to get shot at. I dunno. It feels like, fucking airtight to me. 

"Why did you kill that man? There was no provocation."

"Well, he had a gun."

"So?"

"I don't understand the question."

"Explain to me why you killed that man, as though I were a five-year old, son."

"Ok. I'll try. Listen, kid, that dude had a gun, and he made sure I knew it, so what I heard him saying was that he walks around looking for an excuse to use it. I killed him to make sure he didn't kill me first for a real or imaginary reason. This is a function of my paranoia and the fact that I also had a gun, which I carry because I know a lot of people carry them, and so I knew it was only a matter of time."

So like, I dunno. That's exactly how I feel, so if I had a gun, I would have killed a man by now. You know what's fucking crazy? I think it's a miracle that there isn't more gun violence in this blood-drenched, gunpowder-reeking nation. It's fucking pathological the way shit is about them and it is absolutely incredible that the very gutters don't reek with clotted gore.

No solution! I'm just saying, you know? Well, I have my solution, which is to accept that man with a suppurating infection for a brain might shoot me for a faggot or a wetback or a heretic or some other scapegoat for his own massive personal problems or as a form of revenge against our embattled society with its broken institutions or even just as performance for the pageviews and and that's just how life is, and death is, and fuck him, he's not gonna run my life, make me have things I don't want to have, or do things I don't want to do. I live how I want to live, which is with my hands empty.

Wage peace or fuck off. Or don't. All anyone can do is walk their own path.

--JL