#348

Man, the last few days have hit me rough. What can basically be understood as post-emesis depression has sunk into my bones. A book has performed its egress from conceptual space in the dimension of my mind to enfleshed existence. I was so, so up when I was finishing that book, and I squeezed the brightest light I got into its pages. Gave it every particle I possess, all my warmth and power, draining the reservoir completely, apparently. Now I feel like cigarette ash in a wet tray.

Oh well! What the fuck you gonna do. I will try to get better, try to find traction, try to maneuver that traction into the next book. Gotta do that till I run out of traction entirely. 

Maybe it's time for Album Week 2023. But I gotta do something different for Album Week 2023. Only then will it be able to cheer me up, rather than make everything worse somehow. Had a lot of ideas about Album Week this year, lots of ideas about music. Could be ok. Could be all right. Only way to find out is to forge ahead, to weave a path, to give shape to the vessel.

Next time we'll know for sure, dear reader, whether it is Album Week 2023 or something else entirely. Oh, your breath! It's bated. Damn, baby, take it easy. I know how cool and incredible it is when I shit whatever crap lives in my head about music, making no valid sense and offending all good taste. But if it's something else? What madcap irrepressibility will seize me in its jaws and carry us all off into the nether regions of perception and commentary? What cloaks out of the past or signals from the future will drape our frames or dazzle our eyes as we journey into the thickets of description and hypothesis?

Who gives a fuck who gives a fuck who gives a fuck

--JL 

#347

Man, information. That's some fucked up drugs right there. 

Wishing to retain for myself the most neutral possible starting-point for analysis, I try to limit my daily informational intake, and I try to stick to sources that present their information professionally, source it properly, and provide various perspectives and contrasting commentary as well as a broad assortment of material in writing. One should not listen to people say the news if one can at all avoid it, in my opinion. I also regularly check sources and aggregates I know are ridiculous or obscurantist, so as to remain informed about those varieties of jargon and mindset. Least often, grudgingly, understanding that a lot of people read or watch their news and understand their worlds thereby strictly from materials provided by either msnbc news or fox news, with everybody referencing to cnn news when they're feeling broadminded--in other words, sources which make obscurantism blush--I take a look at what they're up to.

Visiting these nightmare websites this morning, as I do every few months because it is important to see what techniques corporate overlords are using on the news as part of their communications warfare, I am amazed as always, even shocked, at the naked brigandry, the boorishness of their techiques. 

Saw the word "bogus" in two separate headlines on msnbc--is that seriously how motherfuckers edit over there? The entire website bristles with attacks on a bewildering variety of fronts and moral postures, shame running a bright common thread through it all. It's a temple to the pointed finger, to the shrill note that sings in the voice when one is angry to be disagreed with by someone they believe less intelligent, less morally developed than themselves.

The fox news flow is like a hallucination, naked pyschology, not much content. Like experiencing a paranoid delusion firsthand. Larger type, headlines only, less targeted fury, a broader outrage, like a beast whose flank is pierced by arrows breathing fire into the air. Each headline a little angry blast on a cornet or the pleading grief of a fife.

Father to both and cynical heir to their innovations, cnn roars like the one and stings like the other, insinuates and declares and allows headlines whose syntax is built to make head-nodding sense to acolytes and make the outsider cock their head at an angle and squint their eyes. 

These motherfuckers are becoming churches. That's all I'm trying to say. Creepy churches.

*

Dang, I really bum myself out. This is why I adress the concrete matters of the world less and less on the blog. My insights offer me no comfort, and serve as a fairly mealy form of entertainment. 

Read Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century, ed. Alice Wong recently, not a planned book but a very excellent read. Other than that, reading has been mostly in service of school of late. It really does happen like that. I fight it, but the battle is indeed uphill.

Best wishes, dear reader. It's foggy today, that's pretty cool. 

--JL

#346

Have come to identify yet another weakness in my psychic constitution, and as I type that, I want to joke that I need a better hobby. Of course the truth is that the process of recognizing and adjusting in response to our failings, our shortcomings, those foibles of our personality that go so far as to embarass us or harm us whether we are aware of it in the moment or merely ignorant is what Socrates was talking about when he mentioned lives and the due examination of them. So, regrettably, it is more along the lines of an endless duty, this critical process of becoming alive.

Anyway the thing was that one reason I got into walking is, sure, I lost the last of a string of bikes which I have owned and was unable to replace it for years. But also I was partially unwilling to replace it all those years because I had become focused on a solemn convitction regarding the physical, psychic, and spiritual benefits of walking. Correct; walking is the bomb; I have set a great deal into the record to that effect. But there's another side to that too. 

I walk really fast. Locally, I may be the fastest. No one, in my memory, since the time I reached about the upper end of my physical development in my teens, has passed me on the street, the sidewalk, the trail, or the field while walking, unless they literally broke into a half-jog. And, as is evident in the record, I have walked a lot. I'm just gonna say it: I walk like a beast, I am awesome at walking. I've thought about it a lot and put those thoughts into a great deal of practice. 

But even though I believe my style and speed on the bicycle are more than adequate and have rarely let me down, I exhibit nothing comparable to the prowess I possess on foot. I like to ride fast, sometimes as fast as I fucking can, and a lot of people are faster bikers than me on faster bikes to boot; it hasn't happened all summer (this entirely due to the fact that I've had the streets I beat basically all to myself on my rides), but it did today; this wiry dude probably in his forties rode behind me very politely for a while when things were narrow, but as soon as the bikeway opened he lit me up and smoked me to the stub. It was pretty cool. 

At the same time, something deep inside me misliked the feeling, and I knew in my heart that the root of the feeling has nothing noble or sportsmanlike in it at all, coming as it does from a traumatized part of my animal self that hates being approached from behind, hates being outperformed. And as I thought more on that, I came to understand that this part of myself had denied the rest of me the pleasure of two wheels on that basis, when I was weaker and reconstituting myself. And yet, in this, was it not acting to protect me, to set me on a path that would serve me better than the exhilaration of speed? That may be part of it, and it is certainly true also that it was acting selfishly, and would have done the same if it had hurt me--maybe did hurt me. But that is not the important part.

The only important part of any of it is the next step, which is to laugh at myself and begin to learn to let that shit go. And once it is gone I will breathe freer and be more alive. On foot, wheeled up, who cares. We all go at our own pace, and that pace is what it is, and that is right and good.

*

We must be freer, and more alive; that is the point of philosophy, and life.

--JL

#345

First week of the new semester completed, and blessed with fine weather every day, I always rode my bicycle to campus and back. A privilege I have relished every moment.

*

It never fails to pique my interest, the kinds of people the universe holds and which the wheels of fate spinning in all molecules conspire to place on my path, and me on theirs. We are all such collections, such priceless artifacts, such works of art. To observe people and to learn from them more about this world is a privilege, too, even if it's not always as immediately relishable as riding a bike under the blue blue sky breathing the clean breeze all alone.

*

Guests have left, schedules have changed, the leaves at the very top of some of the trees have started to change color. On our Audubon Society calendar, the bird of the month is the Northern Harrier, a bird that is special to the household. The cats are healthy and lively. Difficult though it is, I marhsal social energy and see friends on occasion. The efforts are rewarded, though the process is draining. 

*

September! A month of many birthdays. The season of feasts has entered its first dance. 


--JL