#375

Know what? Double post today. Post #374 was insufficient for this day's needs. Started okay, but my justifiable rage became unbanked and resulted in tomfoolery. It must stand, for I hit that publish button and that's that, but I can double or even triple post if I want to. I'll write posts all day if I feel like it. 

Anyhow, I hadn't had a smoke. Trying not to have a smoke. But now I've had a smoke, and now I want to write a nice post, with fun jokes. 

Fucking pathetic.

*

Had an idea for a deconstructed pizza resturant. Oh, it's so beautiful in my mind. 

Picture this: you are drawn towards a modest little building. The sign out front merely boasted the letters "PZ", but it is clearly a pizza place--there is a picture of pizza on the sign, and one on the window, which looks beautiful and hot and crusty and does not obscure the red-and-white checkered tablecloths and little tabletop waiters full of dressings and bottles of red pepper flakes. 

You enter. There is no such classic scene. The window was some kind of blind hologram. There are only bare formica tables and hardbacked wooden chairs. The walls are glaring uninterrupted white; there are no plants or other decorations. Only the tables and chairs and the double doors leading to the kicthen. There is no music. An impeccable "mater d" glides you to your table before you can turn around. 

Once seated, the server offers you a list of the pizzas of the day, Relaxing slightly, you make your selection. 

In a trice, a plate is brought out from the kitchen. On it, in spare yet artful arrangement, are one of each of the uncooked toppings that would have been on the pizza you ordered. A glass full to the brim of steaming pizza sauce is placed next to it in front of you. As you process what is happening, the smell of hot, melted cheese is piped into the dining room.

After almost two whole minutes have elapsed, a bill totaling one hundred and eighty-seven dollars with gratuity included is placed just within reach of your hand, opposite the glass. 

God, it's so pure I could cry.

(insert joke stolen from Jeremy Clarkson marveling at the circumference and unflagging tumescence of my genius)

*

I also have a plan to save America with a nationwide network of federally subsidized diners--a freestanding, unkillable diner for every single neighborhood, every housing project, every town too small for much else. Carbon-neutral buildings surrounded by carbon-fixing native groundcover, serving better-than-organic and sustainably farmed produce, animal products, and grain preparations, available to the community at fixed prices twenty-four hours a day.

Delicious grits and eggs served with top-notch butter and real coffee all for a buck fifty. A well-paid server with a pension and all the health insurance they will ever need is happy to top you off, calling you "hon", or "darlin". Later, you can come back for a big delicious sandwich made to order for four bucks; the cook remembers you and tips you a wink and a spatula salute. Sheeit, you'll splurge today: return once more for a chicken dinner of half a bird, roast potatoes and green beans, and a piece of pie homemade the night before. Seven dollars even. Take the drumstick home for a snack tomorrow.

Nice. Oh, and kids under twelve eat free off the actually legit and thoughtful kid's menu. 

*

That second part wasn't a joke, just a dream too beautiful to live, I guess. It's funny, everyone I've ever told about it loves it, some people even cry a little bit. I bet if we took one of those so-precious nationwide polls, this idea would meet with approval so universal it would break records. But we live in the world that we have. Not so much the one we'd like to have.

(insert stolen Jeremy Clarkson joke about how my genius triggers seismographs and immaculately impregnates fertile organisms that draw too close to its magical influence)

--JL

#374

Well, good job the state of New York, this is a step forward. Expanding the definition of rape is good and overdue.

Of course, any wild-eyed lunatic of any gender sitting next to me--on, say, a bus--could still shove their hands down my pants, grasp the base of my penis with two fingers, massage my testes with two more, send the last one exploring, and the legal definition would leave me out of the rape equation as long as it didn't find my actual anus.

I hate that. I get that it's all about protecting women, and that is essential. I want to more than anything, basically. But we will continue to have to protect women from a disporportionate amount of masculine assaults and the rhetorics designed to buttress it for as long as the problem of the rape of men and boys continues to be diminished and invisibled in the conversation and the collective psyche.

You couldn't--you seriously couldn't consider the word "genital", rather than the word "vagina"? Rape can only happen to your junk if it's coded female in your primitive-ass, lie-worshipping, fucking sub-monkey society? Nonconsensual cock touching = what? A boyish prank? Natural curiosity? What are you going to tell me--that it's so much easier to grab, we don't want to get into that can of worms?

Fuck you people. 

*

It is time...for me to stop reading the news for awhile. It's like every few months I go from eating a little slice of lemon with breakfast for the important benefits to squeezing double handfuls of  halved lemons into a bowl and shoving my face in, both eyes open. Why? No fucking reason. Helps no one, least of all me. It's how I am. 

Oh, I'll have a puff, just part of this one cig. Ope! I'm smoking three at once? Hm. Well, better finish 'em. 

*

And yet, do I have more sour, vicious things to say here, now? I do! Oh jeezus howdy, do I ever.

-If you read the words "human-grade" on some pet food, the only possible way you can come over all "oh, how good, this will be a good thing to buy" is if you have no fucking concept, no idea what we will feed to one another and legally call it food, nowhere more than here in the U.S.A.

-Why am I still recycling plastic? We have known since the nineteen nineties that this shit is fake, Magic School Bus Special notwithstanding (it is indeed possible for the Magic School Bus to lie--the nineties Lost in Space movie told more truth), and does more harm than good, and it has been proved more conclusively and publicly in the last two years than ever, and still, here I am, having to listen to someone tell me how important it is to wash and sort your plastics to make it easy for the poor heroic fucks running the PLANET-KILLING WATER-FUCKING MICROPLASTICS ENGINE that knowingly and in full possession of the actual results bills itself as a "recycling" center. Is it still better than a landfill? Is it really? where the fuck did you hear that. same place you heard it was going to save the planet? well???

-Jesus, what a waste of both our times. Fuck me running at a rolling donut. Fuck me to the moon. I need to be ashamed of myself today, dear reader, that is certainly true, but you know, maybe consider that if you got to these words here, you waded through many you could have easily lived without, and ask yourself why you spent precious seconds that way. I dunno, maybe you're a kid or teenager and this kind of counterculture pissing and bombast is blowing your mind. 

Well, lemme tell ya something. After even an extended and standout career being angry in a cool way, sadly, you will still live in the same world. So it's kind of a waste of time, and all you've done is train yourself to be reflexively outraged at what you are powerless to change, raising your cortisol for nothing. That's why trolls grin so smug when they piss you off good. They raised your cortisol and kept theirs low. That's why your parents are so unforgivably boring and same-as. Raising your own cortisol indefinitely is no way to live. They represent the finished product of a system designed to grind human beings into uniform, homegenous paste, and nothing gets sanded down or covered up like anyone trying to stand up or out. 

I'm not a bad example actually. I don't even know how the algorithm let you get on here. Even my facebook friends back in the day, all seventy of them, used to not get to see the posts I made to my own wall. I checked and tested. It raised my cortisol, and somewhere deep in the bowels of that devil-haunted ass-company, a troll smiled. 

My advice is to stop reading this blog and learn to grow and wildcraft your own food all by yourself or with a partner. Also make and sustain various kinds of shelter. Consider a nomadic lifestyle. Way things are going, people capable in this sense of things will have to repopulate our vicious colony of virus-brained apes from scratch. It's not the best advice, but it's kind of reasonable. Alternate take, don't repopulate shit. Let rats or cockroaches take a shot at dominance; maybe octopus or squid.

Best advice, reserved for myself, is to write into this blog and other text fields while the world burns around me, as my house collapses, as my asshole falls out of my body. It's not fine, and I know it's not. But I do not care, mind, or think of it as a bad ending.

--JL

#373

Fucking losing my mind over here. But what else is new? This is Factually Pointless, the free and easy ravings of a madman undergoing existential mastication. Rejoice, brethren! We are the eternally digested, breaking down together in the great roiling stomach of this universe. 

*

You see a lot more fake bullshit these days, but that's a) kinda relative and b) if you are of any kind of advanced age, say, older than fourteen, and have ever so much as looked at internet, you should have prepared yourself well for this level of saturation. I get that this is not a very reasonable outlook. We are all built to pay attention to very different things in very different ways, from the obscurely particular to the embodied universals.

My policy is to assume that if an institution--let's say, a governmental organization or representative or representative body, or if you prefer, a media outlet--is putting out deepfaked shit or is addressing the social issue of fabricated content less than adroitly and intelligently, then they know goddamn well what they're doing and projected ignorance must be construed as feigned. I don't accept the kind of fucking incompetence I see out there as legitimate. Safer in the long run to consider it a manipulative stratagem.

*

I may be a no-name idiot with no standing at all in this world, but I don't have to be a fucking sucker into the bargain. If I am tricked, let the trick be justifiably sophisticated. If I am subject to powers I cannot resist, let them at least have to exert their irresistibility. I'm not here to make things easy for anybody that wants to fuck me up or own me. 

*

Feels good to write that, but what hope do any of us have? 

Only hope itself, I guess, and whatever paths our particular hopes can illuminate. Only what keeps us going.

Whatever we do, we are not lost if we hope. In hope, nothing is in vain, and no defeat is total.

*

We cannot know the mind of God, so I would say that my actual leap of faith as Kierkegaard would have it is throwing myself as completely as I can, all my life, into the truth of the prior two sentences. It is easy for me to believe the inscrutable universe has no regard for us whatsoever. I can accept that and understand life, having lived, as an even trade. In context, however, in the human particulars of what it is to have lived as part of a narrative--a narrative, that is what is crucial here--I cannot and will not accept the narrative as shitty. I say it's a good story. I say it was worth telling no matter how it ends, how many fucked up evil details make it hard to stomach. That's my leap of faith. That is what I am a knight for, again, in Kierkegaardian terms.

--JL

#372

Man, not to be a downer or inflammatory, but like, it has to be said. Yeah, Israel's doing a genocide, and that's pretty difficult to swallow. Nobody likes that. Nobody wants it to be true. But that's what's happening.

Sure the main dude says it's not a genocide, and sure, the people carrying out the genocide in real time say it's not a genocide. But that's true of every genocide. Even the Nazis didn't do a press conference being all "hey, we've decided once and for all to wipe out every last Jew we can get our hands on. Our goal is the extinction of their race." No. There was a whole process. There's always the justification, and guess what: the justification is always that we have to protect ourselves because these people are a threat to us, and that threat is in the form of their very existence. 

The subject of genocide has fascinated me since I was a little kid, and how could it not. The concept of genocide flies in the face of every idea we espouse in order to justify our existence as a species, yet genocides happen all the fucking time, quiet ones and loud one, little ones and big ones. The death toll of  genocide has little to do with how big and loud it is, incidentally. The genocide happening right now in Pakistan is big and loud because of the players and particulars, not the death count or the methodology.

Typically for me when I'm fascinated by something, I read everything I can find about it. The Rape of Nanking, by Iris Chang, is the case study par excellence in my opinion, a book so complete and unsparing that its production destroyed its author. Ordinary Men, A Long Way Gone, Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Long Death, The River of Lost Footsteps, Not on Our Watch, A Human Being Died That Night, Carnage and Culture, The Femicide Machine, First They Killed My Father, Blood and Soil, and Howard Ball's Genocide are the other actual books I have around or have checked out on the subject. It's a pretty grim set of titles. But they've given me as much to think about as whole other shelves of less grim books combined.

*

The thing to remember locally is that the average person thinks there's been like, three big, or "real" genocides. Really, just one (which a lot of people say is fake? I dunno, it's getting longer and longer ago, too), and a small group of others that float around the consciousness, and stuff that shouldn't reallly count, like the kinds of genocides enacted on First Nations and other precolonial American civilizations, or Aboriginal Australians, or the Ainu, or on Māori people, or the African diaspora. I mean, how else was I supposed to have a correct life? Live with these other fuckers? I think not.

The character of a lot of early warfare was genocidal the way chimp bands are genocidal in their warfare. The wiping out of bloodlines is coded deep in our behavioral ancestry. And all warfare is inherently at risk of taking on a genocidal character at outset, no matter how virtuous and noble the principles involved might seem.

So without getting bogged down in stuff like soft or chronic or collateral genocide, let us concentrate on genocide as a corollary to warfare. We begin with the distinction between total war, which is the strategy employed by the Israeli Armed Forces at the moment, and other forms, such as hybrid warfare as employed by the Russian state, and indeed, by Hamas and similar groups. Total warfare has proved a bad matchup against hybrid warfare for the past thirty years, and there are really two main reasons it is still around: because the hardware to wage it exists and the manufacture of that hardware is a massive force in the global economy, and because you don't give much of a fuck what happens to your enemy or the ground they stand on; because all collateral is acceptable on the path to total and unconditional surrender or whatever economic or proxy issue the war was actually fought for, if not over. Military strategists will tell you that they are employing total warfare tactics with the intent of preserving innocent life in the process; this is a lie they are comfortable in telling because it salves their humanity. It is a lie, though. They will say that it ends conflicts before they can escalate; a lie. They will say that their tactical deployments minimize risk for civilians and their own personnell; a half-truth that bites like a lie. 

If you wanted to actually do that, you would employ counter-soft power tactics, make a point of visible and provably resultant humanitarian amelioration and civilian protection, and engage in precision attacks on as many hardpoints and nerve centers as you can by training a large amount of small, efficient, well-equipped surgical strike teams and providing them with next-generation up-to-the-minute communications, adaptive reconnaissance, and tactical analysis.

That would work on every axis that I can think of. That's not what the Israeli government wants, because if it wanted it that it would completely have that plus drone support and god knows what stealth shit I don't even have a clue about. I mean, that's what you'd be seeing. They have the money and the experts. Maybe I know jack-all, but that's my position.

You drop bombs because you want to fuck shit up. Because you've got them and you want to use them. Because you want to show these fuckers that they are fucked if they don't fall in line. And you do it for weeks and months because you want everyone to know that this is how shit is and can't nobody stop you.

Call me a liar.

*

As for the fact that they suffered an attack, as for the hostage component--genocide is all about overwhelming, seismic reactions to grievances invented or legitimate. The operations in Afghanistan and throughout the Middle East under the banner of the so-called War on Terror after the 9/11 attacks is an excellent example. The amount of people killed in those attacks and all coalition forces over the course twenty years of war in the Middle East compared to the direct and indirect civilian casualties suffered by the populations on the ground--not to mention the material results of the conflicts vis a vis establishing stability in the region or whatever you wanted people to think you were doing out there--tells you everything you need to know about legitimately aggrieved warfare as it is waged in the modern age.

Sure, the state of Israel has excuses ready to hand, and their state history places them in a unique position re: genocide and ideas about responses to the perpetrations of genocide. The idea that this history makes them immune to genocidal ideations and genocidal intents, that any nation or people's history protects them from becoming genocidal, is nonsense. Countless nations and civilizations have risen and fallen in response to tyrannical regimes or genocidal attempts. Human cultures all around the world have flourished in soil watered with the blood of those killed and exiled. More recently, a modern nation which defined its independence from its mother empire as based on the principles of freedom and humanism enslaved human beings and and did genocide constantly, legally. It's still happening!

What we say, where we came from--it's fucking nothing. What is it that we do?

That's the key bit.

--JL

#371

Can it really be that a rapist and a liar, forced to pay millions of dollars out of one hand for being a rapist and a liar, simultaneously exerts undue influence over the processes of one of the key branches of our government with the other?

Turns out the answer is yeah, no problem. Guess this is what some people think of as swingin' big dick. To me it is just like, annoying. It has nothing to do with dick energy or the size of dick energy, but if I were calling it, I would say that this behavior is tiny dick big yelling energy, you know, like that shitty little wife-beater guy in Of Mice and Men. But that is more than what you need when so many people have been bred and trained to have gaping asshole energy. Born to be fucked. Born to grease your own cornhole and bend over, simpering and wiggling your hips, hoping you get dragged to the woodshed to be ministered to.  

That's what fucks me up and keeps me up at night. A land salted heavily with wicked and devious bottoms, simping for their daddy. With their giant trucks and their shame and their war weapons and the books they wanna censor and the history they want to erase and their Punisher stickers and all the rest of their precious little symbols, their mealy banquet of putrid ideas written by losers who only ever have lost in order to appeal to smaller, bitcher losers. 

And yet before they lose, they do manage to ruin everything and shock the uninitiated with their ability to improve upon the damage prior losers wrought. That is because people are scared of monsters, but what they should really be afraid of is cowards.

*

What the fuck everrrrrr

--JL

#370

Reflecting on the origins of this blog: a way to strengthen the case for purchasing one of the texts I was putting out on kindle direct publishing, something that receded quickly in importance, surfacing occasionally and even recently with the completion of The Tetrahedron, but which I have decidedly abandoned in the interim. It has never helped me sell so much as single copy of any book, which is lucky because the books as objects are not that great. I made a lot of mistakes because I am an indifferent jackass and did not repair them all for the same reason.

Getting them off the store and closing out my account is bothersome and I haven't done it yet, but I will. For now, The Tetrahedron and my first collection of short stories remain, as these texts and the books that contain them are relatively unblemished. Anyway, the blog is as important in its own way as what I have heretofore referred to as my serious, actual work. How did the blog come to be, and how has it become what it is?

*

Well, first, what it is might be the purest and most clownish form of staring into my own navel. A friend, not disparagingly, refers to it as my diary, and I have jokingly referred to myself as a professional diarist at some point. I guess it is both these things and I sort of am, but because I set myself very specific constraints and aims when I approach this text field, and have generated work that I find worthwhile thereby in a literary sense. The public nature of the act lends writing a high-wire act feeling which galvanizes me, and has driven me to produce far more involved and dense prose than I ever thought I would give away for free, more baring of myself as a person than I thought I would ever dare to make clear--and now it strikes me that this corpus, unwieldy and patchwork though it may be, is a valuable contribution to the "free" content available on internet. It pleases me to have given this away and to have it stand, free to all, and I am excited to continue.

Initially, as I said, it was something more on the order of a free sample cart, which would entice readers into paying for my stories and poems. I was out of work and holding onto a bunch of credit card debt accrued over the preceding three years in an effort to have some quality of life and treat my partner right, which was simply outside of my means. This situation cut through my distaste for commercialism and my horror of having to try and sell myself to other people. 

Longtime readers will remember that I used to write a lot more about the weather, about walking, about the sky. These things are still important to me, but they made their way so insistantly into the blog because I was walking five miles a day to work and five miles back constantly in an effort to accrue the capital to work off that debt--almost $6500--back to my dad, who had paid it off for me so as to rescue me from the interest. It took a long time and a lot of work. And in that time the blog, too, was a sort of life preserver I could cling to when I had lost my boat. How did I come to lose a boat? Hard thing to lose. It's basically you; I mean, we are our own boats on the sea of this existence. 

*

Not long after I broke off my first engagement, leading to the fraught, complicated, and misunderstood end of that relationship, I sank into despair and the beginnings of familiar drunken oblivion. The end of the engagement, the putting off of marriage, I had wanted, for many discrete and interconnected reasons--including guilt over that debt, which she knew nothing about, I suddenly realize. Hilarious.

Losing my partner, that I most certainly and firmly I did not want. I have, in other posts, said that I ended things, and that is a simplified version of things but not the truth. As we would both learn, you cannot always get what you want, not even when you were so close and everything seemed so great. Sometimes getting what you need means losing what you want, and vice versa. These are simple things every child alive experiences over and over, and we all spend our whole lives learning it again, because maturity may or may not be a myth, but the notion that it comes in stages with the crossing of abritrary thresholds or grows steadily with time is certainly bullshit. 

She was a great person, a brilliant person, wonderful, iconic, and I am certain she still is. I was a fool, broken and falsely mended. Brilliant, if you like--she thought so, and that must count for something--but any alleged greatness and wonderfulness I may have shown was the imperfect product of a vast effort on my part, predicated and founded on a lie. More on her and that another time.

*

A scant couple of months into my aforementioned despair, I found myself gravitating towards a particular customer at the place attached to the kitchen where I worked. Something about her; her extremely conservative, masculine clothing (this works for me--a lot of things work for me--though I am a being of fickle appetites, and what works for me in one person may not work in another), the way she carried herself and smiled and spoke to me, though calm and ordinary, unmistakably intimated extremely great sex. I began to feel that the time might be ripe for a passionate encounter, to remind me that life was not over and to get me back into some form of regular existence. At least, so I reasoned to myself, at that time. 

Also ever since I started having sex, I've had a problem with stopping for any length of time. Weird!

So we smoked some weed once when I got off work, this led to that and the other thing, and couple hangouts later we were fucking savagely on her apartment floor, eminent examples of the frenzied, thoughtless beasts we cerebral chimpanzees so easily and joyfully become in the throes of that seal-fresh-popped sex.

Our thing wasn't romantic at that stage, and much grief would have been saved if we had possessed the critical wherewithal to keep it that way. That is not how life tends to run its operations, I have found. 

Grief, it turns out, exists to be spent. Its veins are there in the bedrock of things, like seams of metal waiting to glimmer when the stone surrounding it gives way to the probing of human beings in pursuit of whatever they think it is they want, to be torn out of the earth, twisted into new shapes, and passed around as currency or beauty or utility, to be alloyed with other volatile, gleaming things pulled out of the darkness.

It's a fucking hell of a thing to be alive, is what I'm saying. I'd rather stick to bragging about how incredible she was at giving head, the only person who has ever brought me actual pleasure by playing with my balls at the same time; about how we fucked in her apartment and my house and in Alabama and Florida and the mountains of North Carolina and in the duplex we moved into after all that, but grief eclipses these simple joys. 

Anyhow. The sex was absolutely bangin'. Yes, she was, ultimately, a narcissist who made extensive use of me, and sensing this, I began using her to kill myself, to reduce myself down to something easily destructible. But while we were fucking, all of that was all right by me. Fuck drinking myself almost to homelessness, insanity, and death, I later thought. Prolonged intercourse with a narcissistic sex worker is the better slow suicide by far. Drinking is fun, but how could it ever compare to sex? Shit, most motherfuckers in this life learn to drink in hopes of getting to try sex, or get ahold of the fucker again.

*

She specialized in older men, particularly older men whose interest transcended the merely routine and sexual. She liked to be taken out, treated well, presented with gifts. She was a genius in many ways, a very masculine, Aspberger's genius, which permeated her personality and aesthetics. She was fascinated and passionate about illumination technology--flashlights. Dear reader, I know shit about flashlights and what the best flashlights can do that I would never have imagined previously. I have been in the workshop of a mad genius, whose technological breakthroughs in illumination have him in dialogue with national security agencies who wish to make use of his achievements. 

She also loved knives and was into independent blacksmiths before Forged in Fire, especially that dude Liam Hoffman, and she bought one of his knives made from like decomissioned battleship steel plating and a mahogany handle salvaged from the same ship. She was into a ton of shit--crazy high-grade herbal supplements from Sun Potion out in California, highly advanced nutrition, such as powdered vegetables from Dr. Cowan (read his book about how the heart is not a pump; pretty good) and other biodynamically farmed produce (she was, as some readers may have alread recognized, educated in the Rudolf Steiner system), blue glass, perfect German water bottles made of tempered glass--glass was a thing, basically--structured water filtered through no-plastic systems, no-plastic everything except these indestructible bags, metal containers to keep shit fresh without plastic, especially trail mixes composed primarily of sprouted almonds and Turkish mulberries (she was Turkish), ferments, traditional earthenware vessels, turned wooden bowls, dark instagram with like the crazy comedy snuff movies and devastating injury reels. 

Yeah, she was batshit out of her mind, but brilliant, with range most people lack. I wanted that crazy at the moment, and everything else she was offering. She took all the room I willingly gave her to drive, which meant I did all the driving. I served as her chauffer and aide-de-camp, essentially. Didn't have to work, she paid the minimum balance on my credit card for awhile (she had lots of money), and though I threw out the bulk of my possessions, we did hold on to all my books and shelves; in fair exchange, I cooked and cleaned and did most of the rest of the labor of living, drove her to whatever town she had an appointment in, be it profesional or optometric or to whatever store, and on whatever odyssey struck her fancy. It didn't matter. I was down. She kept me in weed, and it was on her indulgence that I began a three-year span of being high every waking minute. We ate basially exclusively amazing, clean, well-crafted foods. Most importantly it was great for awhile, running around to wherever every single day, never stopping to rest or think. She wasn't one to let the dust collect on her. We climbed mountains in North Carolina, checked out the Jim Beam factory in Tennessee, drove some of the Appalachian Trail roads,  jumped into the Gulf of Mexico off the Florida coast, watched the surf lap the docks on the Saginaw Bay, screwed around for awhile in Chicago. We drove back roads and country roads, rarely using any highways. I got to know a lot of our home state and a few of its towns in new and intimate ways, wandering around, surreptitiously consuming marijuana, praying to myself as I wandered.

*

Sure, the way she was at restaurants, with customer service in general, was a kind of nightmare. There were warning signs, which I happily ignored, in how she dealt with having a problem with her landlord early on, which led to us getting a place together. A maneuver, in hindsight, but also a characteristic element of her being-in-the-world--post office drama, server drama, doctor drama, this bitch motherfucker that asshole--all to create the frame that she had been cheated out of what was her right by the incompetence or aggression of a fundamentally innocent workforce. I mean, the fucking entitlement of a narcissist in service situations--it's aberrant, but keyed into the routine. It serves them well because it breaks the social norm so completely by using its mechanisms legitimately, so no one ever has time to adjust--you are pinned in their deft manipulation of what ought to be regarded as normal. 

She taught me finally how to deal with that, where to draw the indelible line that they can never cross. Draw it without passion, with a peacable smile, without letting yourself become drawn into the weeds or the particulars. Do this implacably, and they will recognize that they are known, and look for easier prey. I had a customer, long after after it was all over and I had done the first part of my processing, who hinted at me in our first interaction, which was very successful and normal-seeming--they always are, but it was something in the eyes, the smile, that spoke of having found a mark--that she was going to do the narcissist runaround.

The second time, the instant she became unreasonable, I drew the line. She didn't like that, and the change in her demeanor let me know that I had read and drawn correctly. She would have killed me right then, I wager, were it not for social consequences. And she never fucked with me again. She tried it with my staff, but I'd given out instructions to just come grab me or someone else who can hold their ground if I wasn't around. After a couple of instances coming up against the unscalable wall of unmoving politeness that I had built, she moved on to easier hunting grounds. 

Yeah, I cuss a lot and talk dirty here. But that's because we're close, dear reader. In meatspace, I prize the burnished chainmail of my courtesies very highly. It is rare that I use my real voice in the real world--one only deploys armaments when defenses have failed to repel, or when duty calls and there are no other voices to be heard.

*

Most every narcissist knows that they're fucked up, but the arguments they are wont to craft for the case of everyone else being the fucked up ones can be quite compelling, and of course are ironclad to the craftsperson. They're usually instinctively extremely intelligent, and usually intellectually savvy on top of that. They know they're built different, and are dangerous. But they're not monsters or anything. They balance it with generosity (they keep score on this generosity, but they cannot help that) and other ameliorative acts, they do their best to be as human as they can be, just like most other people. They bestow, engage, educate, try to share joy. But they are fundamentally gatherers and hoarders, owners, and their feelings of safety are found easily in the wielding of power, over strangers, conditions (particularly economic conditions), and loved ones. And their successful wielding of that power can create feelings of nausea and guilt, which they combat by doubling down or making themselves more unbearable than ever, until they are rebuffed, and then, relief, more guilt, remorse, and editing the past to make the future possible because ultimately you gotta be yourself.

It's not anything any more sinister than most other personality types. I can personally attest to theit humanity running as deep as any other human's. But the trauma that they cause is acute in its own special way, and since I possess this trauma, my thoughts on the matter tend to be somewhat more rigorous and label-determined than my wont.

What's fucked up about my personality type? I'm easy to get along with but almost impossible to know deeply, keep my own counsel basically always, and disappear into myself regularly. I vanish. I do not attach myself to the lives of my friends or even my brothers. I am the wandering fetus, and I am a different kind of narcissist. We all are. The mainstream application of the term as it stands now is in reference to high-ability manipulative grifters who specialize in capitalizing on vulnerabilities and structural inequalities, which makes them good at gaining and managing power over people. We've had quite a few presidents and hundreds of other government officials like this. People like this often pop up at or near the top, in world history. It's just how it is.

Explicative, huh?

*

Later on, when things started to dismember and disinitegrate--she took a trip to Turkey and when she came back, the shine had worn off me, apparently--and the question of my finances became pressing and front-facing, I made the books out of my collection of poems and the stories, which existed as a group and had been shortlisted for an award and publication but did not make the final cut. I created the blog and began typing into the blog, as I said on the advice of the kdp website, which stated that a blog would help attract readers. Whatever, I said. And you can read the blog from the beginning for an obscure yet revealing account of my days from there.

You can pretty much tell when it ceases to be a mere exercise and starts to become a way of surviving, albeit practically against my will. Did Factually Pointless save my life, a little bit? I'm going to say probably.

*

Pre-hiatus and Post-hiatus blog, the hiatus being the entire year 2020 for reasons I hardly need detail, are two different works, it seems to me, as 2020 changed me quite as completely as it changed the world. We all went through a lot then, or at any rate the vast majority of us here on this planet. Since 2021 the blog has been more difficult for me, my ability to engage with it more sporadic, but this is shaping to be a standout year for Factually Pointless, and I am excited to bring these ideas to you, dear reader.

Talk about navel-gazing! Let us hope for something a little more stimulating to the general public tomorrow, dear reader, though I know you don't mind reading my diary.

--JL

#369

Triple sixty-nine. Hilarious. Also known as the Isosceles Lock.

*

Man, you know what I hate? The only thing, object, phenomena I really actually in all seriousness hate, besides hatred itself? Money.

Folks, I fucking hate money. I hate that stuff. I'm coming out as saying I was born with a suspicion around the concept, my childhood grew thick with further doubts about the stuff, and ever since I was a teenager, I have just plain fucking hated that shit. I hate money so much that I'm trembling slightly.

As will inevitably happen with hatred, money hates me back. Good! Screw that nonsense. So my life is more difficult. Maybe that's the price I'm comfortable paying in a world that fucks the shit out of itself for money.

*

I don't want any more money than I have, and I could stand to have less. What I want is to not need money to stay alive. I think that in this day and age that is fucking insane. I know I talked about this pretty recently, but it's the first month of a new year. A ripe time to call stridently for what is needed in the future, to start great works. 

Take the necessities of life off the market and provide them universally to every living human. Provide scientific endeavor the funding you provide the military-industrial complex--we need next-level globally applicable materials and energy options faster and more completely than we're getting them. Weapons are something we have enough of, I should think; I know the people who make billions of dollars crafting weapons would beg to differ, but somehow, I don't trust their testimony. We need to go Bio-Coruscant* if we don't want that Road Warrior shit.

Everything else can continue as the luxuries market, where motherfuckers can destroy themselves and everything that makes them human for imaginary gains all they want if that's their blue heaven--as long as they can prove sustainable and not planet-killing, since not having that will destroy us all anyway.**

Give me the option to stay out of it, and live a simpler, more peaceful life in the knowledge that my having it doesn't deny anyone else their chance for theirs. 

*

Doesn't that sound ok? Fuck, man, you'd think I was asking people to eat a plate of raw dicks. 

"What about my riiiiiights?" Bitch, you simped those away a long time ago and I'm not saying I want to take more. I'm saying we need to sort out the basic shit before we worry about getting you your own gold crapper like the one Donald Trump uses to help himself convince himself he's worth a tinker's damn. 

"What about logiiiiistics?" Do you seriously mean to tell me that with the worldwide circus of mental gymnastics and indecipherable riddles that is the current state of economies, currencies, supply chains, trade--if that somehow grinds on, built with no plan and cobbled together in motion ever with an eye out to allow grifters and thieves to ply their wicked trades, we can't design something better on purpose that works towards reasonable equity and the material advancement of the species, rather than its degradation and self-destruction?

Probably not? Fine, whatever. A man can shit his dreams into whatever hat he likes, though, and this is mine. 

--JL

*this is an idea I have played around with in my head for a long time about how we could shrink human-occupied space on Earth while increasing quality of life for all humans and achieving optimal harmony between human and nonhuman biospheres. This could eventually become a project that is holistically entwined with the maximum possible planetary surface, a fully symbiotic relationship with Terra. Hence, Bio-Coruscant, credit to George Lucas. I also think of the Chozo, from Metroid, as an interesting model, and the Forerunners from the Halo universe. Look 'em up if you care. 

**I get that the game with some of these shitty little pigs is to survive the anthropocalypse and define the new postdiluvian world as gods, progenitors of Human 3.0. They're playing a game they don't understand, but if we let them win, I guess that doesn't matter; we won't be around to raise objections or point out their failures. And time will roll on with all our dusty bones in its wake. But here, now, I say fuckem. That's all the power I have? Fuckem anyway. Regulate these assholes. Fuckin write a new book to throw at them. Consider that a formal request to whom it may concern.

#368

We all have a reason to go to internet, or anyways, we should. Most people's reason to go online is to find a reason to be online, which many corporations and technologists motivated largely by maximizing the potential of the space to generate capital and influence in powerful, throbbing feedback loops have taken advantage of in just the way one would expect--to do landscape architecture on internet that renders the space a sterile, frictionless conveyance to impulse purchases and the ratcheting of emotionally-driven dialogue into the stratosphere. A droning, monochrome soap opera running in tandem with the purring cash engine feeding publishers of every description and giving everything to the shadow government, feeding on pain and anger and regurgitating more of both, funneling in more and more people to crowd into their immaterial coliseum to purchase ideas, opinions, bread, circuses, feuds, mindsets, a common, neutered language, whatever other fucking bullshit, including unhinged conspiratorial nonsense stitched from whole cloth and anti-semitic science fiction. 

The currency? Why, basically free. You got the juice and a portal and a way to get the signal, you might even think you get the rest for absolutely free. But there is always a charge in this world, starting with the calorie, and on internet you pay in time and attention, which the aforementioned robber barons and slaves-turned-masters realized early on is more valuable than any other resource in the world. Now that, you give away for free, although there is case to be made for the idea that you are, in fact, paying for the privilege to give it away and then have it sold back to you.

Life is rife with such comedies, and was long before internet, but it has been just a thrill ride to see the process take place so quickly, to hear about the old days and the true frontier era as I grew up, to be a part of the first large colonies and explorations in the time of the dot com boom, the puncture, the renaissance, the premodern forms of internet, and then, to have become a worthless old relic typing away into a blog--a fucking blog! lmao--the online equivalent of a typewriter in a derelict old cabin on the stony shore of a frozen lake--in this absolutely poisoned and degraded (and worse, prophecied, planned, and executed) merging of meatspace and cyberspace that even now is undergoing another seismic shift and showing new terrain, outgassing some weird shit as it plays out. 

Well, it is the Third World War. Some cracking and tearing of the norm is to be expected. More precisely, it is the latest stage and the beginning of the third peak of what could currently be termed the Global Centennial War, if one had a mind. 

*

Before Ukraine, which I wrote about and hoped would be over with quickly, I had prayed nothing would break out in Europe in the first place, because the odds were good that they would and it would seal the deal. China re: Hong Kong and Taiwan and the U.S. by proxy, Russia's perfectly effective soft power maneuvers, North Korea and South Korea, tensions sliding up in the Middle East--a broad and engaging stripe of potential energy. A ground war in Europe would close the cordon, and did, and dragged on, and subsequently (with timing so perfect vis a vis the obvious effect on the United States and its election politics that a suspicious man would, well, harbor suspicions) the most globally contentious centennial conflict pops off again, and now, today, it's all basically engaged in a perfect, classic fault line, from northern Ukraine to the South Pacific. The gravity of this line, which was potential and is now smoldering and sparking, pulls everything else in. I say not that it will; it is pulling. We are going for a ride.

*

Anyhow, back in 1996, when it could be optimistically opined that we might not have to deal with any of this kind of fucking horseshit next millenium, I started clicking around internet in order to explore more about the Animorphs books. Of course they got me with books; Scholastic knew what the fuck was up. "Vist the website at..." right on the back-page ads. And I would! Why not? It was in a book!

So I read everything on the site and downloaded and played hours of their little yet robust browser games. I read about other book series, authors, everything that drew my eye on the Scholastic website. And did I want ro read more stuff? Well, yes. I'm into that. And it seemed like there was some stuff to read, there on that old internet. It seemed like there was actually more to read, then. There aren't really websites anymore, but there sure used to be. Dozens of the little guys, at least!

*

My reason for going to internet has always been simple: to satisfy my curiosity and explore culture. This very organically led me to play my small roles here and there throughout the twenty years of culture wars birthed in meatspace and tempered, perhaps perfected, in the message board of old. I have seen no real innovation in the deployment of ordinance and the specifics of that ordinance, at any rate; by and large it is the medium that has evolved, or been taken over by it like a cordyceps; the exponentially expanding factors have been area of effect and penetration. The twitterification of national television "news" outlets is a good example of the latter. I knew those Something Awful Buzzfeed motherfuckers had their proof of concept the second I saw a random tweet on a screen behind a newsanchor talking about the tweet. The facebook effect--making the first space online to truly echo in form and function the sparse, corporate, eternally-tweaking, never-changing, smooth-eyeball smooth-brain virtual reality of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash--served to pull in millions upon millions of the uninitiated, like a wave of immigrants to a new world, induced with pleasures and opportunities but in fact there to serve as a resource, to be strip-mined, to be pickpocketed, to be manipulated and tricked and herded like the cattle they regrettably are. 

The weaponization of dangerously alienated and isolated individuals (a common and natural consequence of fundamentally inhuman and hypocritical society, whose schools are the presages and pipelines to its prisons) is an example of collateral damage, fed into and further weaponized by the very systems that created these conditions. Like so much else, it predates the internet--see Richard Wright's Native Son for a compelling narrative exemplifying this--but has been accelerated by its machinations and their interbreeding with the overarching aims of mass media. Roland Barthes' Mythologies is a good book to look at too. Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom, while we're listing shit that helps explain how fucked up our situation is. 

Now we have a whole nation under basically a four-point, double-blind hermenutical delusion enchantment. Not for nothing; a binary division makes both sides easy to play against the middle. A chatter war with very real, on-the-ground, in-your-face consequences, and you need look no further than the events of January 6th 2021 to see documentary-style proof. It ends in blood. Sorry to be such a downer about imminent conflict on these grand dramatic scales in this post, but them's the times*. I'm livin' through history just like you, baby. I mentioned acceleration in the last paragraph--an important theme when discussing internet and its whip-fast tentacles. Since this seems to be the post I reccommend all kinds of supplementary texts, and I mentioned documentary-style proof, Andrew Callaghan's work in This Place Rules is everything that I could have personally asked someone to make on the subject. That dude knows his shit and how to wade through it. For being one of the only journalists in America--by virtue of not really being one, plus the benefit of a solid head and a suite of personal qualities that lend themselves to the task--a natural, in other words--I would like to take this opportunity to extend formal appreciations.

*

Before wikipedia, which I look at every day, there were lots of websites just about sharing information, telling stories, making informative stuff people could access. Message boards are still the place for the deep wisdoms, if you can sift through the wreckage and ignore the limpets clinging to the hulls of those great ruined ships. There was this really great mythology website, just top-shelf that I read all the time. There was also a website where a man detailed his experiences and the ins and outs of having sex with dolphins in the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, a story I love to tell. Eat your heart out, Margaret Lovatt.

The first piece of video pornography on the internet that I ever saw was of what appeared to be a college girl who had a German Shepherd in her tiny dorm room. She let that dog fuck her, dear reader, and my twelve-year old mind, which thought itself hardened by its first season of education at the hands of print smut and jpegs, lay cleaved in twain. I had no concept, even less concept of filming something like that and distributing it. Who is this for? I remember thinking, over and over. Well, plenty of people; in the no-holds-barred, no-one-the-fuck-is-looking days of yore, bestiality porn was crazy prolific. 

Check this out: I had to see what some stupid fucking train tickets cost for some stupid fucking homework. I typed "amtrac" into the search bar by accident. It took me to a website that at first blush looked reasonably like the entrance site to buy tickets for a train; logo, the colors looked right, yada yada. But there were no links or text fields. At least, I thought so, until I saw a little button at the bottom, kind of popping out in yellow and green on that dark blue and white page. It said "Extra". Well, what is extra? Why not find out?

Extra is like seventy popups. Girl sucks goat penis, girl puts a fish or a snake up her vagina, girl fucks dog after dog after dog, and of course, the holy grail and crown jewels, girls take horse cocks. Girl fucks lion was probably fake, gorilla too. But like I said, I go on the internet because I'm curious. I know exactly what a goat penis looks like, and the logistics of getting one in your mouth. I don't know who gets off on seeing a girl put a fish inside her, but I've seen the thing done.

I've seen a lot of things done, on internet. It's not all just reading. And when you've seen stuff like that, you have to know what the fuck else people get up to and--for the love of god!--post where people can look at it. I was a teenager, and I did my job: I made it my business to look at every kind of pornography people made, and think about why they made it. Yes, dear reader, I am not made of stone--I looked at stuff for myself, for the purposes of ejaculation--not the stuff with animals. But that represents only the well-worn comfortable patch close to home, my humble knowings of what I want, which is straightforward and quotidian, with a high production value. Stories are good. Yet in my zeal for discovery, for novelty, for the unimaginable, the psychology and effort of it all, I roamed very far afield indeed. 

Eventually, I had to concede. It's anything. People will fuck anything and get turned on by the idea of turning into anything and fucking anything while it turns into something else. There is no limit. We'd turn into a gas and fuck other gases if we could. We'd let Pyramid Head rip off our whole skins if we were convinved it would get our rocks off like never before, one last time. Thousands of people, perhaps tens of thousands, have probably already masturbated to that fantasy.

Eventually, I also had to conclude that in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand, sex stuff is not really creepy or scary or even that strange. Our culture makes even missionary-style for the furtherance of the species a thing of deep and brutal shame, something ugly and dangerous to show and see and know about. But sex is sex. People have a drive, and it is bound up with identity and creativity and embodiment in miltitudinous ways. Mostly, we could stand to leave each other alone about it and have our shit out in the open where it can be a thing of daylight. Also the line between fantasy and reality is generally thick, and the translation from ideal to practical typically fairly modest, and if it has its risks, so does every other human behavior. Even that old missionary can result in penile breakage and vaginal tearing. It's not a safe act, and that statement is manifold--disease, unintended progeny, improbable lighntning strike.

Which brings us to the actual scary shit, which I don't really want to give any power to in this space. That stuff can stay in the dark. The dark is quite good for some things.

*

 

Look. You can't get that far into seriously discussing internet without discussing bestiality, and bestiality-adjacent phenomena. Definitely internet is basically synonymous with pornography, not to say sex crime. But I'll definitely say sex crime; there's a whole TV show been running for decades about just that.

Guess I should say that you know, the complex issue of having sex with animals, having sex with objects you've anthropomorphized, like pillows or hunting bows or the Eiffel Tower, having sex with anyone or anything--all complicated, all brutally simple--is that we are certainly animals, never more animals that around the issue of and in the throes of sex, and to humanize sex, to moralize around it, is equally complicated and can be as easily and as destructively harmful to society as not giving it any thought or effort at all. People should not be demonized no matter how outsized their proclivities, certainly not in a broad stroke based on sharing those proclivities. 

Also I would like to point out that while people wring their hands very publicly about fetishists and drag queens and trans people, hundreds of thousands of women and girls and thousands of men and boys across this continent are very quietly and matter-of-factly being sold into and existing in sexual slavery, which is not really a political hot button issue for some reason, except when it's totally fake. 

*

All that being as it is, as individuals we are the first in the line when it comes to understanding and regulating our own actions, and there is no doubt that actions in the sexual realm carry a certain existential weight. So, we must have our own rules and values. We must set boundaries that matter. Here are mine:

-Don't fuck without consent. 

-Animals basically can't really consent; if they fuck you, to my mind it's basically because you tricked them. Furries are a distinctly human-type-sentient subset of animals and are not the locus of this discussion, but it should be easy to find that if you want it.

-Don't fuck children or teenagers, their consent is not the same as your consent; curiosity, trust, and compliance are distinct from consent and are not replacements for consent. It is much worse than a trick no matter who you think you are or what you tell yourself you're actually doing.

-Don't fuck without consent, even if you need to bleed or draw blood or worse. Guess you could call yourself unlucky, but you're gotta figure out how to get what you need consensually. Hopefully safely and preventatively against infections.

-Again: don't fuck without consent, the more specific, the better, and don't abuse consent by throwing anybody any curveballs en flagrante delicto. 

-Making erotic drawings or generating overtly positive written or filmed portrayals of anything that breaks these rules is a pretty fucked up thing to do too. Using art and the position of the artist to wield power and influence over consent is not consent, and you don't fuck without consent.

Personally I think these are extremely basic and leave room for probably ninety-five percent of the crazy shit I've seen online. If you can't hang with these rules, well, it would be better that we never meet, we shall certainly not fraternize, and don't let me catch you doing your dirt, because probably what I will do is administer a forcible halt. This will very likely involve strong prejudice on my part, and that's just the breaks. 

*

We just finished rewatching the first season of True Detective, so maybe I'm a little nerve-frayed on sex violence and the fucked-up conditions we live under at the moment. 

Didn't think I'd end up talking about that stuff! Any of that stuff. I had no idea, when I fired up the text field, that this would happen. Am I really going to hit that publish button? I guess at this point it'd be dishonest not to.

--JL

*remember how wrong I was about Kanye vs Oprah 2020, though? I could be wrong like that again. We can only pray.

#367

A kind of madness I am well-used by has taken its familiar possessions. My mind is a ransacked fortress, the only feelings of safety found in raising Pocket Monsters with the only focus available to me that is quiet and warm, and that not unfailingly. 

Well, what are you gonna do? We are the piece of leather that we are, and have we have been shaped and marked indelibly by all that touches our surface and affects our texture, the irrestistible forces and the hard corners and edges of things. 

So it goes. The worst part is I'm not built to properly care about the problems, I am built to flow around them like water whenever possible and concentrate only on what I care about. My childhood shaped me for quiet acceptance of what befalls me, for the world is a beast not to be controlled, events are driven by the devil, and the only true release is in the infinite immanence of God, in radiance beyond the universe, in that which is that it is. My sense of victory comes with letting all pass through me and over me like a gravitational wave, leaving only the remnant on the very curve of spacetime, and a prayer that this remnant will be more free than the preceding form, less tied to the crude materials of this world. 

Yes, that part of me that longs to be destroyed. To be crucified, then ascend.

*

As anyone can see, deeply Catholic grandparents and a healthy chunk of early education administered by Jesuits really did a fucking number on this poor sinner. But how can I blame them, or anyone, for anything? The thing cannot be done in good conscience or honest thought. The thing cannot be done at all.

*

In the end, it's just us, alive, right this second, doing what we're doing. The past is dead. The next second could be anything. We have what we have in front of us, right now, and nothing else. Gettng the body to the next thing. 

There is no time or space for heavy shit in this life, for blame, or fear, or resentment, or anything except what is light to carry, what is uplifting, for hope and curiosity.

Love is heavy, but it's heavy as it needs to be to make you strong enough to fly.

--JL

#366

Well, letting it rest on 365 for a bit was nice. 366 is a cool number in its ow right, in many ways cooler than 365, at least to me. Without the context of what we know about elliptical orbits and the arbitrary decision to measure time by them, I wouldn't care a jot for 365. 366 though, that's a dope number. Three followed by two copies of its double. Multiplying each digit in sequence gives you 108, whose digits add up to 9, a number very closely entwined with 3 and 6. It is also the 9th multiple of 12--a number closely entwined with 3, 6, and 9--so dividing it by 12 makes 9. I don't know why stuff like that is so effin rad to me, but it always has been.

The rules of how to write out numbers in writing are important, but I give myself permission to eschew them at least partially whenever I do the type of paragraph that precedes here. This type of paragraph is a whole thing with Factually Pointless. Search for posts with numbers in the tags, and be amazed by more of this content than you ever dreamed you'd need, or existed, probably!

*

Sequentially speaking, since I'm not gonna write about sports today, Factually Sportsmanlike 2024 is over--for now. When the time comes, maybe soon, Factually Musical 2024 will retain is week-long posting space, but for things like Factually Sportsmanlike--any type of subject to be featured in a specific way--will have an establishing sequential trial run and then be available to feature whenever I chose, perhaps as a one-off, perhaps for a short run. Factually Musical may eventually roll out this way, too. 

Of course, I might write about anything at any time. The features are about how focused a post must be on its subject and how that might be amplified or played with in the overall structure of the one post and the posts around it. Any one ordinary post might contain subject matter fit for multiple features, but is not a feature, per se. 

*

Both Golden Sun games for the game boy advance are playable on the switch online, and as one whose very first complete RPG experience was, in fact, Golden Sun, this is delicious. I delight in revisiting them at these screen sizes and resolutions, and even more in the idea that a new generation of gamers will be able to enjoy them. They are pure artistic and mechanical joy, amazing art, shape language, color stories, gorgeous light and particle effects, battle summons whose whole graphical pachage defy the machine's limitations, everything. A way of using the pixel to sculpt three-dimensionality with a smoothness rarely achieved. And dudes, the fucking music. It's just some of the best music written for any games ever. Period. At eleven years old, I sank hours into plunking away at a keyboard, transcribing the theme music. I would go to the overworld and just lie down with my headphones plugged into my GBA, blissing out on the composition, the astonishing painterliness achieved with the midi tones.

They are simple and workmanlike games on one level--lotta these puzzles are gonna feel rote and characteristic before too long, though for every few dull repeats and going back to square one, there's memorably interesting and devious ones--but they explode with such character, beauty, and contain such surprising depths: djinn mechanics and the choices around them, summons and class builds, and a special profundity in the characterization of people moving through a living, changing world. The huge story rolls out with a confidence in itself and an ambition that is almost unwarranted, but pay themselves off and deliver incredible finales. 

*

Ok, I'm hungry. Then I gotta do school shit. Have not been as diligent as I expected myself to be, despite completing all my work and doing well so far. What I need is to both chill more and work harder, or maybe smarter. HA! What I need is universal basic income, healthcare, shelter, and nutrition. It is incredible how low our bar is for calling ourselves a modern, scientific society. Fucking pathetic. I give us an F. F for fuck that. Everything I just said is cheap, both literally and if you just decide it is. 

I'll say it here, and I'll repeat it whenever I can: the role of government as we have understood it is done. All it can hope do to now, the only way to save itself from being supplanted entirely by the corporate ecosystem which already wields greater powers, is to become a bunker for the people. It must provide the basics of life--roof over the body, food on the table, and the doctor whenever you need it, FOR FREE, plus money in the pocket so you can go always, without fail, go out and give at least some of it to the corporations, so you can be that nomadic dollar that bleeding-edge capitalism needs you to be. Let people try to get rich, whatever. Let them lose everything, but never their basics. Let everyone have the basics. I know that if you allow yourselves to look at it as math problem, and prorate those effects honestly, you will know that I am right. You will know it can be done, and you will come up with the logistics. 

Infrastructure? Man, incentivize it somehow, make a pool rule, and have the six or seven biggest companies foot the bill. Shit, you could rebuild every city in the world sharpish on the same tip. 

Need more money? Fucking print it. More labor? Fucking pay for it with the money you just printed. Get it done, get some actual shit done, and figure out the rest later.  

Punch up as hard as you can now or get killed in the tenth round. Up to you.

--JL

#365

As of this moment, someone could read Factually Pointless one post a day for a full year, which is cool, but the coolest thing is that three hundred and sixty-five million years ago the Devonian Extincion went down, one of the truly hardcore ones for the oceans, which at the time made it deadly to just about everything. The nascent tendrils of terrestrial life at the time, relatively fresh from the briny deep, made out fine, though. It was their time. End of the Devonian, dawn of the Triassic. It's bonkers how incredible thinking about that makes me feel. Time is just so fucking crazy. Life is just such a trip. 

*

FACTUALLY SPORTSMANLIKE

ROLLS ON

Balls--spherical devices made from a range of materials to roll, or bounce and roll. Light and heavy, big and small, the ball is the massively significant fulcrum around many games and sports, usually played in large groups and divided into teams. I like handball, myself--just a body and a bouncing rubber ball that fits the hand snugly, and a decent wall built perpendicular to the decent ground. Poetry. 

We have come up with many novel ways to cause the human body to interact with various balls in order to achieve various goals. Some sports even include manipulators for their balls--stickball as played by First Nations; the descendant of those games, lacrosse; baseball, tennis, polo. I also like to play tennis against a wall, but a singles match is fun, too. My serve is for balls, but I got a pretty hardcore forehand and good net game. My backhand works from anywhere, not bad, but it's not exactly gonna light a fucker up. 

The coolest thing about soccer is getting to use your head. That's far and away my favorite part. I got a great dome for it, and my power in the neck and shoulders gives me the control required to use it however I like. Passing, defense, scoring--it's just more interesting if I get a chance to use a header instead of footwork.

Waterpolo, you play ball in the pool. If it wasn't also about getting sexually assaulted under the water, it would be fun. I guess some dudes don't mind. Love swimming to death, and the game isn't lacking in fun. But my participation level reaches zero the moment a dude tears my swimsuit down to my knees to prevent me from scoring. It's like, you win, bud. Maybe if we started naked, I wouldn't take it as personally. I have no problem wth nudity or competing naked. I have a problem with being forcibly stripped down. A dude almost pulled my shirt off playing soccer once and I'm not exactly proud of this but I punched him like three times as hard as I could. Don't grab my clothes, man!

One time playing gym soccer when I was eight the ball got kicked into my testicles so hard I fell down on my back and whited out for a second. When I was six playing in Rec and Ed it hit me in the face so hard I thought my eye had fallen out. That one stung like a hundred ants, though it didn't knock me off my feet. I just stopped running, put my hands on my knees, and tried to breathe enough to scream, not quite getting there before I was hustled off the field. In the car, my father praised my toughness about taking a cannon like that, and I told him that I thought it hurt so much I couldn't cry, so I wasn't sure if it counted, but as he was quick to remind me, I got back in the game. One thing about me--it takes pretty serious damage to keep me from playing a game I'm invested in.

I find it is enough, with a basketball, merely to hang out with it, and you will find yourself having fun. A Spalding basketball is a marvel of ball technology. It is fun merely to stand in place and dribble slowly. It is fun to hold. It is fun to pass it to yourself lightly from hand to hand and it is fun to circle it behind your back. It is fun to throw in the air and catch, fun to roll off your fingertips and watch it spin like a little tigerball in the air, it is fun to rebound off a wall over and over. Make it or not, it's fun to go for a basket. Some stuff is easy to ruin, but it's even fun to play basketball with a basketball, which is awesome. Catching a good hard pass in fast motion can be a nice, solid way to remind your body that it's a real thing in a real world, with real people all around you doing something real, ephemeral though it all is, unreal as reality can be. Like music. The analogy has been drawn a million times, but it holds.

 *

Thinking about balls and games and sports and athletics is thinking in venn diagrams of sorts. Chess is certainly a game and could not be called a sport by any means, though it is as competitive and perhaps moreso than any sport. A video game may or may not be competitive and if competitive may or may not tick enough boxes to be called a sport, but there are those games in which the level of competition and ability climbs high enough, plugged into the right matrix, to be called a sport--many different fighting games and resource-tactics-strategy games, racing sims, deathmatch arena games, and others can be called sports in serious conversation--the hand-eye coordination, reaction times, rules, and muscle-mapping is sufficiently demanding that it takes particular skill, dedication, physical ability, and practice to compete. That not only a layperson but a person who plays games extensively, whose neural pathways and reactions are more than suitably attuned to play, is more than likely unable to even think of being able to compete at the highest levels is a huge factor in differentiating a game from a sport. Of course, most sports, especially as we think of them now, are definitely games, albeit athletic ones, or ones in which your whole body is something of an analog controller, and/or a unit playing out their part of a larger strategy in a metagame played by coaches. Finally, there are ways to compete and "play" in the realm of feats of athleticism that are neither games nor sports, such as several elements of track and field. These rate more on the order of performances than sports or games, even the races and the relays, which have a lot in common with games and are spectacles, like sports. All these, cross-country, discus, javelin, the high jump and so forth, and to a debatable degree gymnastics, are more akin to performances than games or sports, though they are attended to as and perhaps are even more than many spectator sports tests of human athletic ability, directly linked as they are to survival schema dating back to jumping around in the trees and our later migration to the plains and running around for a living. Certainly more than bowling, for example, as gamelike a sport as it is possible to find. Anyone can bowl, even if they can't. And anyone can learn to bowl a perfect game if they tune out distractions and put some sustained effort in. Not everyone can dash the hundred-meter convincingly, let alone competitively, and not everyone can compete against others for superior bowling records season in and season out. 

So going around the three circles and accounting for outliers, hybrids, I think of another circle, or perhaps even the very field on which the circles are described--the great level of labor and craft, the massive economies at play around these essentially ludic pursuits. The textiles, the writing and keeping of rules, the training of children, the armor, the color theory, the balls, the playing fields, the goalposts, the gymnastics equipment, the stories, the broadcasting, the energy and fuel requirements, the worldwide shipping, the political sphere, the question of rights, of meaning, of power. 

I have decided to coin the term "ludistics" to broadly cover THE PRECEDING, t.m.

Suck it, whoever cares!

*

Cool cool cool cool alright alright now let's keep the ball rollin

--JL

#364

Had a lot more thoughts about basketball and strategy overall. Forgot 'em all, but you might gettem anyway as it would appear that the desire to write more about sport and the sporters who sportem has resulted in the firm acceptance of

factually sportsmsanlike 2024

and they might flow back to me, depending. All of this is in the hands of God.

Damn. Welcome. Wow. Man, my mind is blown! Never in all this typing did I dream the blog would do this. I would have laughed at you had you suggested it, dear reader! Man, we gotta both strap in today.

*

When Muhammad Ali passed from this earthly plane, I bought a few of the magazines that I thought seemed irrestitible in the size of the moment. The LIFE magazine or however it would be appropriate to write that out was by far the best of my three selections in the checkout line at the Walgreen's next to the Autozone I was working at back then, more like a little book than a magazine. 

The best photograph among an impressive amount of great photographs as I remember it was of Ali in full profile at the bottom of a swimming pool, one foot far back behind the other, knucks up. The almost unbelievable beauty of Muhammad Ali is, I think, nowhere in greater evidence than this photograph. 

Wish I could say who took it, make proper citations, but I lost the magazine in one of the near-constant moves of my twenties. Sad loss. 

*

My wrestling coach, who coached me in both middle and high school and also happens to be the local sherriff, showed us a tape of the Rumble in the Jungle. At a wrestling camp I attended run by Steve Fraser--where I earned a t-shirt for completing the Grind, meaning I wrestled full-out, pausing only to switch opponents, for two hours solid, which I admit is one of my proudest lifetime accomplishments--I was shown it again. The analysis provided by both these coaches changed my life, and made Muhammad Ali an immortal in my eyes.

Not just the power. Not just the technique. The strats. The fucking strategies, baby. The bright shining line from before the thing even gets going to the win. When you have it all worked out and you know it can work. You see the shot clear and complete.

Seeing someone pull that shit off is one of the most satisfying spectacles in life. That art of war shit. One little pop, one little surpise to throw the opponent off balance. You anticipate where they go to regain their balance and if you're right, if you gauged your opponent accurately, you have them from there because the rhythm and the pace belong to you and they'll go where you take them.

You write a poem that dances in the air. Your feet trace an invisible mandala. You follow the bright shining line.

I would be remiss not to mention that the man lived an incredible, outstanding life in many other ways. I would argue that he is a touchstone in American history. 

*

Winning is cool. Let's face it. Winning can feel pretty good, and fulcrum of that is that it proves something, however ephemeral. It says something true about that moment.

Victory isn't something I really prize, though, because that moment is gone in a flash and I care as much or more about process than outcome. 

Now, they say that winning isn't everything, and that is actually bullshit. It is everything. We don't get into competition to fucking lose on purpose unless we're fucking with someone as a way to win on different level. There's nothing wrong with losing, because someone has to and everyone will. You might put up an undefeated professional record or whatnot, but at some point in your life you lost, and you learned from that loss; if nothing else, that the feeling of loss is unbearable in the extreme and that you must build your life on winning. Being as I personally identify very strongly with the Brilliant Loser competitive type, this is not the lesson I take from loss, but we are all different and it takes all kinds to make a worthy contest. 

And at some point, we like to see the proof of ourselves in the outcome. Just once at least. Even if you never taste it, though, that doesn't mean going for it was a waste of time or wasn't worth it.

They also say that it's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game. This is technically true but it is used incorrectly as another way to say that it doesn't matter whether you win or lose, because what is actually important is the process of building character, of winning and losing gracefully. What is factual is that how you play the game indelibly affects how you win or lose, and that it is how you win or lose that you played the game. There is no actual durable distinction. Broken down further into the root truths: grace is indeed required, not only in victory and loss but in process. The tally of victories and losses is nothing more than a byproduct of a process whose aim is not to demarcate winners and losers but to engage human beings in a process of aspirational dynamism. Of growth, adaptation, creativity. Perhaps what they say is functional, but to me the fine points of the breakdown are essential.

It is not dominance that ought properly drive us in contest, or the fear of loss, but advancement, improvement, building bonds, inspiring ourselves and others to greater heights in all aspects of our lives. It is the example that we show by how we strive that is essential, not whether we win. Because victory could never satisfy us, and loss could never deter us. What we seek is transcendental.

We stay in the process. That process is both spiritual, laden with immanence, and grounded in our bodies, our brains and muscles and guts and bones. The point is that you put it all in the line.

The bright, clear, shining line.

*

More tomorrow! Man, I got plenty. This is crazy. For now though, the winds blow towards other waters.

--JL

#363

Well, my actual labor for this school week is complete, except for securing my materials and doing a bunch of reading and a small amount of tasks around that reading, a couple hours of work which I have four more days to complete. At any rate, I am free to leap into this first today, which is exceedingly pleasurable.

Hey, post 363! I FUCKIN LOVE THAT U KNO HOW I AM PEOPLE three six thrrrreeeeeeee

*

Fuckin addicted to smoking again. It's easy to tell. The main thing is breaking your word on yourself and bargaining with yourself only to break your word again, a cycle which makes every pack of cigarettes pose a question of incredible weight, and the failure to answer that question supplying guilt as fuel for the weight of the next question, and so on.

This is why they tell you not to smoke, but if you're ever going to smoke, not smoking is impossible.

Addiction is the land of amongst the most demonic tautologies that plague consciousness.

*

Typing that stressed me out so bad I went to smoke a cigarette. And how precious, the calm that flooded my whole system! And how pernicious, that guilt should stress me out again before the cigarette is even smoked to completion!

They do talk about them, these vicious cycles. And how much viciousness we poor earthling creatures will subject ourselves to, for just a snatch of comfort!

*

So. Watched that documentary about Magic Johnson and Larry Bird a little while ago, which marinated, by and by leading me to start watching Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, which is a shitty title about something I thought I didn't give a fuck about. Once I had the context to give a fuck, because it is actually some damn fucking interesting American history, the title was fine, and the show has made such statements and shown such crazy real shit about the human condition that it hs brought me to tears multiple times.

My father is going to have a field day with this. I have asserted that professional sports in America constitute multiple forms of modern physical and mental slavery, and he hates that to death. Particularly the word slavery, which I'm actually still not going to back away from one inch. We've argued about it a lot, with some heat. 

However, it has become impossible for me not to concede that there is more to it, that it is something essential that runs through our shared existence and that it is conceivably a net good. How I fucking hate to see this. How it galls me that this fucking propaganda delivered its payload with such faultless precision.

Still. The purpose all art is to help us see that the world is more complex and layered than we realized, that our perspective is never ever complete, that motivations that run differently and even countered against our our own have validity that we may never access, but which exists. Even propaganda can show us this, and serve as an inoculation to its more sinister forces.

*

When I was coming up, all that eighties shit was literally ancient history. I never even heard the name Magic Johnson until I was like twelve or thirteen years old--primarily through AIDS jokes, ha-ha--and I didn't really get who Larry Bird was until basically two months ago. 

23 ruled the heavens and the earth when I was coming up. 

Talk about propaganda delivering its unerring payload--my dad made me try all kinds of sports as a little kid, but I was pretty whatever about all that--all I cared about was reading, and watching Fantasia and The Little Mermaid over and over and over again. Later though, I would also be get into cartoons of all kinds--the early nineties animation revolution which swept me up still supported hours and hours of the old Hanna-Barbera shit, and I loved them toons almost as much as the crazy gorgeous new shit that was happening. So, Space Jam happened, and basketball was the shit to me all of a sudden, the only sport I showed genuine enthusiasm for. I mean, sue me. I was six. Space Jam holds up ok, too. Plenty for the furries there. 

My father seized upon this with both hands; he loves playing sports, especially goalie in soccer, and basketball. I remember with great fondness a basketball jacket he bought me, in great nineties-bright teal and violet and black with white piping, with that iconic dunking profile puff-embroidered on the back, royal purple on a field of midnight. 

So I used to watch basketball with my old man, the Bulls in the nineties, other teams I don't really remember, even Venezuelan basketball, Los Cocodrilos de Caracas against whoever. I have to say the poetry and exuberance of that team name exceeds any in English, in my humble estimation. And I did basketball camp at my catholic school one or two summers. When Disney's Tarzan* came out, I remember a camp thing we did was take an afternoon off and watch a pirated tape of it. The colors were unbearably garish and the plastic straw from somebody's drink was in and out of the frame for three-quarters of the runtime, but it was a pretty fun day at camp. Air-conditioning, you know. 

I fucking suck at basketball. No grace at all, I mean none. I can pass well and play good strong defense, but under pressure and in the flow I have literally never sunk a shot. I mean, definitely never in middle school, the last time I played basketball seriously. Maybe I'm forgetting scrimmages at basketball camp when I was eight or nine, sure, but in conscious memory, any baskets I have made in this life have been foul shots, drills, and playing HORSE, which I have never won. Gym class? Did I score scrimmage baskets in gym class? Maybe? I honestly think not. Bad at ballhandling, no great dribbler, and I have to think way too much to play offense. It's like this in soccer and football and lacrosse, too. These team sports that rely on spheres, formation and location on a field, man. I cannot think offensively as a player under these conditions**. 

However, I am good at getting my hands on the ball. Sure, once I have it, I can't help that much, because I don't grasp the art of scoring. I mean, a breakaway layup is easy enough to understand, but I'm bad at them, and get confused when I try to execute offensive strategy beyond identifying my best pass. I'm good at taking it down the court and making a solid pass, but not very good at protecting it from a defender or working my way in or even finding a position, which wouldn't help, since I'm a christing bricklayer out there. I'm not tall and my vertical is, to say the least, humble. But I play aggressive defense on the wings and outside court, of which I have an intuitive strategic grasp.

Disrupting offensive strategies and discovering the best ways to guard particular individuals quickly comes naturally to me, though, and I can move well enough to fuck things up for taller, faster dudes. Playing that outside defense, I become a total asshole, getting right up inside em to kill their momentum, checking and snatching, hips low and shoving hard, putting my hand about three inches from their face so they can't see anything but me and get pissed off enought to take me on, which is when my surprisingly fast hands come in. I don't know how I'm so decent at getting the ball, but I think it's even more about my eyes than my hands. Plus, timing. 

All this boils down to my middle school basketball coach literally screaming at me afterwards when I tried to make a shot one game--I really must have looked like a fool--but praising my defensive capabilities in just as loud a scream most other games, his "tiger on d." I was able to play my part, so far as that went.

*

Later than all that, wrestling in high school, this one dude Oakley had a habit of throwing his right arm out extremely fast out of the greco-roman stance, if you were fool enough to lock in with him, and snatch a single leg for the takedown, or move the hips in quick enough for a headlock much more difficult to defend against then a straightforward one, a sequence I studied and adapted to myself because it's a great technique for someone with quickness and timing and who can get low and up fast and smooth and grasp the footwork. Also because it worked extremely well on my friend Topher, who suffered badly under Oakley's lash, and subsequently, under mine. He paid me back in many kinds, though. That's wrestling.

Anyway, Oakley's trick never once worked on me. I could see the arm coming a mile away, and the thing to do is loosen up out of the stance lock--which you should never fully commit to anyway, in my opinion--duck the arm like you would duck a punch and use the advantage to lock on the body from the side and take him up and back down to the mat. I must say that as I was a sophomore and Oakley was a senior, I felt no guilt about slamming him hard, and he had to develop other ways of dealing me, which I harbor some pride about. 

Topher came up to me one practice after losing to Oakley yet again. 

"Hey. Ok. How do you beat Oakley's thing?"

"What do you mean?" I have to say, I was a different person then. I knew exactly, minutely what he was talking about. He overcommitted to the lock, trying to muscle Oakley into something as quick as he could, and was helpless against Oakley's move. Couldn't avoid the arm even when he tried, couldn't get the leg away after. I was being a dick because I wanted to hear him say it. 

"The arm thing. Dude, I can see he can't get you with the arm. How are you avoiding it?"

"You just duck."

"How?"

"What are you talking about? When he goes to do the arm thing, you fuckin duck the arm." I was being earnest at this point. I'm not that bad of a dick. 

"Well, how do you see it coming?"

Now I was baffled. I mean, how do you explain better, honestly? You see it coming and you react. I don't know how else to say it, still.

"You see it coming and you react." 

Suppose now I might add "You wait for him to do it, you know he likes to do it, you know it works if it happens, so you anticipate it and you react. You know if it misses it creates an opening, and you concentrate on that, all before you even lock up, all before you even square up. This is chess. You have to chess this all before it happens and then you're fast enough easy because your eyes are faster and your brain doesn't have to think as much and you just move because the moves are already all laid out. The rest is timing. Timing."

Back then, I just said "What the fuck's so hard about that? Duck the arm!"

"Dude. I can't see it coming. He's too fucking fast. But you're not faster than me, I know because we wrestle too, so how the fuck do you do it?"

I stared at him for a few seconds, probably with my mouth open, and told him I literally didn't know how else to explain it. A simple task: dodge an incoming attack. If you can't, you fuckin can't, I guess. Back then, I was not nearly as proficient with or dedicated to the concept of empathy, and conflated mercy with pity, so I could be pretty harsh with people a lot of the time. 

*

Wrestling season overlaps with basketball season, so the game was something I left behind. In that moment, I also completely stopped giving a fuck about it even as a concept. One of those breaks so clean and complete you never think about the past of it all again, really. Until you do. 

*

Guess this has been Factually Sportsmanlike 2024? It's one of those one-offs I like to do sometimes for sure. 

In other news, I really like listening to The Electric Mayhem, formerly Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem. They sound pretty good. 

--JL

*Tarzan's kind of a weird movie. Kind of uncomfortable in a lot of ways. Definitely it showcases the idea that Tarzan is like a Superhuman Noble Savage Jesus. His ability to learn English in ten canonical minutes twenty years beyond the crititcal period certainly speaks to that. Even if we accept that he's technically multilingual because he can speak animal tongues and is also some kind of ideal, natural genius in the body of a demigod, it's a pretty out-there sell.

**never mind hockey. I can skate well enough, but what the fuck is even playing hockey anyway? That shit is craaaaaazy. Hockey players come into this world with computers running a significantly different operating system than the one I got.