#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?

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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.

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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