#351

As I moved a notebook on my desk just now as I went to type, it fell open to a page with some of my handwriting on it, which I read out of that momentary curiosity that such events may trigger. Dimly, very dimly remember writing this, because I thought when I heard or read it that it was very beautiful somehow. I guess it is. I mean, I still think that, now that I relax into really thinking about it rather than wondering so avidly what it means, you know? The urge to decipher and decode can indeed obstruct true meaning betimes.

Anyway, this is what I wrote:

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Salt Marsh Snakes

drink only rainwater

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There you have it. It makes sense. It's what I would do, living in a salt marsh. Straightforward stuff, just what poetry is made of.

Oh, I bet it was in Wikipedia's little Did You Know?... section that they have on their front page. I look at it most days. It's almost always got fun stuff to perceive and think about.

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It should come as no surprise that I pretty much fucked this semester up. Stopped attending two of my four classes, managed as little as possible to scrape decent grades in the other two. It's been so much illness and pain to deal with. I didn't even mention yet how fucking sick I got after Thanksgivng, I was slightly deliriously afraid I might die at a couple of points, like how it gets sometimes when you're proper fighting it off. Fucking goddamn it all, though you know? Fucking school, fucking grades, fucking bodies, fucking societies, fucking shitting World War fucking III and multiple motherfucking genocides and fucking the total collapse of rational, cohesive thought thanks to playing around with fucking computers. Fuck it, that's all. Just get it the fuck fucked. Fuck that shit. Fuck that. I don't want to give a fuck about any of that fucking shit right now. 

So fuck it! It is all just ass, and the shit that issues thence perforce!

Whew. That's feeling a little better. 

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To microquote Kimya Dawson's music lyrics, sorry I'm a deadbeat friend. That's a powerful non-sequitur, needing no elaboration or specification. Happy to use it as a springboard to the next thing, which has nothing to do with this.

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Don't believe I mentioned reading Stephen King's Fairy Tale--it was a heavy hitter. Putting it on the same racetrack as Eyes of the Dragon, Fairy Tale laps the poor old beast and stays winning. King's still not quite my favorite hand with elements and structures of  what might be termed high fantasy, which is why to this date I have never been able to stay with The Dark Tower. But the fairy-story elements were very powerful here, the included elements of the high fantastical ennobled for being more authentically Stephen King, the horror more horrible, the beautiful more true. Of course it is low hanging fruit to say the man is older and has read more books, but that's only part of it. It is a true modern fairy-story, which I believe to be a spiritually advanced accomplishment. Very good work out there. Gives a person some hope.

Also reread Breakfast of Champions, the Kurt Vonnegut book that really got me on that particular tip for serious. I read Slaughterhouse Five for school and loved it, but it's the one you grab under your own power that has more power to stick with you and define you, and so it has been. It was also interesting being reminded how much of the insight on the world around that I have presented people in my adult life came straight out of reading Kurt Vonnegut to completion as a teenager, before he was dead. Refreshing, these breezes from youth, and strange. I'm rereading Jailbird, now. Maybe Galápagos, one of my most favorite books ever of all, after that.

This is yet another in an increasingly criminal list of non-sequiturs here in this post, but astute (and almost frighteningly pedantic, with what I would term abnormal levels of recall) readers will have noticed that I posses the following three books, acquired in order: The Penguin History of the World, A History of Europe, and Europe 1880-1945, all fully or mostly written by the historian J.M. Roberts. The nature of this constellation pleases me greatly; a set of lenses, increasing in magnification, and it is a great pleasure to imagine the lenses switching back and forth, the overlap, the gained and the lost from the coarse grain to the fine and back again. I like to think about all my history books like this. Holster full of lenses.

This has been your book update, you filthy, reprehensible bibliophile. I mean that like a screwed-up, violently expressed paraphilia, not the family-friendly way fuckin' society, fuckin' librarians would have it. Pft. I'm gonna put my dick in one of my books immediately. 

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Ah, it would have been great to end the post there. But I've been advised not to leave jokes about my own personal sex stuff up where anyone could just quote me out of context without leaving myself an out. My sex stuff is pretty boring, frankly. Like...not vanilla, but plain yogurt. Kefir. Stuff like that. Pouring liquid yogurt into gaping assholes, mixing it with lactation, pouring it all over the floor and rolling and thrashing around like you're having a seizure, that sort of thing. Nothing weird. 

--JL