#388

Guess the thing for me to worry about right now, besides all the seriously material shit in my immediate surroundings and the world at large that demand strained thought, is to wonder if I don't merely have depression, but bipolar disorder. Suppose I should have wondered more about this earlier, but maybe it just morphed into this over time. 

I was a very happy child. Until I got depressed for the first time when I was eight, nothing got me too down for very long at all. Happy baby, happy toddler, happy little kid. Bad shit was bad shit, but you rolled on, found the joke, picked up a book, got a hug from someone, and time would go on under the light of God. The first intimations of a more durable maturity and the depression was immediate and tactile, and basically instantly, I wondered if it would not be better to be dead than to feel this way.

Got over it, but after I turned eleven I got depressed again and that never really went away till I was maybe twenty-three, though it turned inward and became a hot and accessible rage that fueled my teenage years especially. Then it was matter of riding out feeling normal and riding out feeling depressed, outside of those occasions in a given springtime when I'd lose my mind and hit the eject button on my life. Yes, manias. Sure. Mania is certainly not outside of my experience of depression. Neither is joy, nor satisfaction, nor feeling free of the extremes. Felt like I understood myself pretty well since I turned twenty-eight, and till this summer things were as stable between my familiar highs and lows as they have ever been. Maybe the lows have been lowering the last couple years, but in a way mostly grippable.

But the way it played out this summer and fall, I have to wonder if things are the same. The up was too up, and I didn't realize it at all until the crash almost killed me. Still skidding and rolling. Some days literally can't do a single thing outside the confines of my property and only a select few within. 

In this darkness there is still contentment and satisfaction, the happiness of accomplishments and love and play, friendship and ice cream, etc. There is still this here, this text field, and the other ones in which my service as a conduit brings me to life. Reading Martin Buber's I and Thou translated and magnificently introduced by my beloved Walter Kaufmann, and that has brought me feelings similar to reading Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, which is the highest compliment I am probably able to pay a writer of thoughts. 

There is no denying or leavening of the bare fact, though, that being that I feel as bad as I have ever felt in a life extremely intimate with bad feelings. As Kierkegaard would put it, I am deeply and profoundly ill with despair. 

*

The only way out is through, having become stronger, with time. Ah, time! But time is so precious now, here, in this maelstrom of irresponsible acceleration.

Nevertheless, I won't be rushed. Hate that. Clinging like ivy to the wall of this world is an act of patience. That's all I can say. Sometimes ivy grows and sometimes it doesn't. 

You cannot rush it. You cannot help it. It just has to hang on.

--JL

#387

Due to climate change, where I am it is as through we are stuck in the state of locking--past autumn, before winter--and will miss winter entirely this year, going from a long unlocking to a short unlocking before an even hotter summer. Naturally I am presupposing. Days in February that are almost sixty degrees Fahrenheit are something I am thinking about, but in a slippery way, the unreality of it clashing uncomfortably with the plain fact. 

It's an uncomfortable thing, this evidence that if just a few human beings don't change their behavior, billions of humans suffer, along with most other living things. The ones who don't change their behavior don't suffer, of course. It is an amazing quality in an organism: when the stomach is full, the danger response is dulled. At the Bellagio, the champagne still flows and the air conditioning still runs, and so, the world is as it should be. 

Those who are pressing the knife to our collective neck will not themselves feel the pressure till they reach out their hand and no one slips an alcoholic beverage into their grasp. Then they will look around, really look around, and see what has actually happened while they drank on a full belly all their days and never stopped trying to get more.

*

Ah, for a dark and quiet earth. 

But no. The dark and the quiet remind us of death, and on top of that it bores us. We must have such noise and such light that we cannot hear or see, and we pray we won't feel anything either.

We always do, though.

--JL

#386

It is such a mistake to live within industrialized society. What a trap. What a miserable cage we have built for ourselves, our masters delighting in rattling it and poking at our vulnerable flanks through the bars.

For the safety of the cage, we put up with it, and forsake our precious lives.

What fools. What tools. What anemic caricatures of ourselves.

*

We even fight wars for the privilege of this sterilized hell. We allow wars to be fought on our behalf.

We call it good. An even trade.

*

These so-called telephones, addictive portals into a nether realm of nightmarish engineering. 

This chimaeric hydra, capital. 

Infinite chatter. Hydrochloric acid on the limestone of our minds. Chlorine bleach in the soil of our souls.

We call it wealth, and leisure, and efficiency, and productivity, and connectedness, and the duty to be well-informed, of the immense importance of our opinionate display and the general good health of our intellectual array, by which we mechanically sort ourselves into absurd tribes and ridiculous hierarchies.

We call it common sense. We call it righteousness.

*

Someday they will tell each other that as Rome fell, so did her heir and the global empire she forged, fifteen hundred years later or thereabouts, after they have emerged from the consequential period of chaos and forgetting. They will tell each other a fragmentary but satisfying version of how and why it happened. It will have no bearing on their own inevitable disintegrations.

Like cancer, the same accretions always coalesce in the body of a society, a variety of corruptions of form attacking a variety of tissues and bones. It kills them, but never immediately. Slow, fast, painful, bearable. Bodies run down. It's what they do.

We never admit this, though. We say they should not. We say we may yet unlock the secrets of immortality. We say that our city of man will last through eternity.

*

If I am a doctor, I must be a poor one. Enjoy my diagnosis, for I know no cure.

--JL

#385

Curious about exactly how many words I have pounded into this text field over the years, I tried to search for a way to get a full archival word count without having to ask anyone to write any code about it. Instead I found out that I write this blog incorrectly on every axis of performance, according to the top minds; this goes a long way towards explaining my total obscurity, if one were seeking an explanation beyond those plain to the eye. Basically, I don't care about the things people care about. Story of my life.

Also, the amount of my work that I have made available for cheap or free on internet means that I am basically unpublishable, as it stands. Publishable material must be generated from scratch. Happily much is forthcoming, but still, disheartening, especially as the prevailing reasoning seems to be that all work needs to add prestige to its publisher through exclusivity, which seems to me an ungenerous way to put out art, but then, I am perhaps the furthest thing from a businessman. 

Though, it is an opportunity to reformat and tweak all my old work and leave it waiting to coalesce somehow. It is an opportunity to set off to new terrains unencumbered.

Still, the main point stands: I have amounted to precious little in this world, generatively speaking.

And so what! Let it be what it is. It's all just a kick before senescence completes its unerring work.

We stick to our labor for its own sake, such as it is.

*

The fuckin thing has to be like more than a hundred thousand words at least though, right? Maybe someone can find out. 

*

Wondering now if the answer is simply to just make a website, sit on a domain and give the shit away that way. Set up a tip jar. Fuck it, if it pays for itself and a sandwich once in awhile I'm basically one step up from where I sit now.

*

Having a lot of trouble finding even the most menial of jobs. This has never happened before. Do I have to consider going back to the Chinese restaurant I worked my first job more than a decade and a half ago? I mean yes. I do. Shit is that fucked. Paranoid that I'm on some sort of blacklist. 

*

If it is so, let it be so. Chart the course day by day and never let the demons beat you down.

--JL

#384

Here we are, the final post of Factually Masculine 2024. Haven't thought about it too hard, but pretty sure I've done an amazing job. That's what being a man is all about, sweetheart.

*

What then, by my lights, is this thing we call man, this measuring-stick by which we mark the lives of those before and who we are? What does it mean, if I call myself a man?

Man is that which stands with and apart from others that are called men. Man is that flesh of the thinking ape which knows it is not as fundamental as that which it is not, and fundamental to what is. Man is mother and child and that which cannot be mother or child. Man is alone in his flesh. Man is part of a great whole, flesh of one flesh. 

Paradox. That's all any of us are. To cleave to one side is to live in a dissonance, however servicable.

*

Man is the exploration of what man is in the positive--aspiration--and the negative--denial. It is the definition of two lies which contend in the service of a truth which cannot be apprehended. 

*

It's not like you or anybody else knows any better. The hero has infinite faces, infinite quests, infinite genders, infinite alternatives, infinite flaws, and each only the perspective which being-in-the-world as a subjective phenomenon grants the being which calls itself something in the language it has learned, imitating what was there to imitate.

If you want to know what kind of man you are, you have to understand that only you can decide what that means. You will have to deal with what you find and what the world makes of what your findings lead you to express.

Man is the universe perceiving itself through something. A membrane, a tissue, an accretion, a reflection, a refraction, a shadow. 

Just a dream.

--JL

#383

Fucking crazy. These American fascists are seriously down to Weimarize us and clean house. I can't believe the current administration didn't send word down to quietly dispose of a dude like Stephen Miller in the dead of night about early spring 2022. I mean, given the shit he did and said before he was in the White House the first time, the shit he did once he was there, the fresh shit he has now come out and said, the plans he has laid out, all the shit that's happening with the shit falling out of these motherfucker's mouths--doesn't it seem like justifiable use of deadly force in the name of national security? I can't believe these fuckers killed MLK and Malcolm X but Stephen Miller draws breath and says federalize select National Guard troops to deport whoever the president says, wherever they are. Pray tell--aside from all of the massive civil violence such a move would portend--where will you put these people, on their way out, since presumably you'll de driving millions of people like cattle and like cattle you'll have to process them somewhere, I dunno, some sort of camp maybe, where they might end up for longer than predicted, where a lot of bad stuff can unaccountably happen and we don't know just how bad till later.

How many dudes just went out and signed up for their National Guard units just on account of he said that? Somebody checking that data would maybe note little spikes in certain states and areas. Just hinting. Coyly, even though the game is getting pretty fucking easy to call at this point. 

If I had the native sense God gave a goose I'd leave the country right about now. But I lack even that, because I am a man. Still, maybe today is a good day to think new thoughts, thoughts that could maybe carry me far, far away from this place and these wretched dangerous fools. Oh shit! Wait! I got new windows coming.

Guess I have to die in this house. More specifically, in my front yard or atop my roof, protecting my windows and everything behind them best I can. 

Factually Masculine 2024! Bereft of good or common sense!

*

In the western canon, we have a personality test from back in Hellenistic times: are you a Stoic, an Epicurean, or a Cynic? These days: false, brittle, plastic, blank-eyed stoics can be found in significant numbers, blackpillers fail to pull off the point of Cynicism, and you have to have partcipated or accepted the secondary benefits of incredible injustice and human suffering on a massive scale to be able to successfully pull off something resembling epicurean lifestyle, since the values now necessarily entail a level of asceticism  beyond reasonable thresholds. All this is to say that a peaceful life is a privilege and by no means a cheap one, whose price is basically that no matter what you pretend to yourself you are, no matter how you enjoy your pleasures and the sense of righteousness that comes in "earning" and managing those pleasures, you are a tool, and a wicked one, wielded by--you guessed it--liars and thieves, the very liars and thieves I have harped on all along here.

I'm something of a Skeptic, myself, but everything in life is plotted on a spectrum, as Aristotle wisely taught. 

You can take this test with all kinds of three-dude, three-school combinations in order to define yourself and bare yourself thereby to the interpretations of others based on their interpretations of dudes or text or loosely-defined imprimatur. Western canon, Eastern canon, or tradition or whatever we choose to call a textual continuum/semiotic landscape/etc., doesn't matter. Mix 'n match. 

Do as you please. Read what you can get your hands on. Think whatever you want about it. Cinema works this way too. Interactive entertainment, like video games. Looking around at the buildings motherfuckers built where you live. What were they trying to accomplish with these buildings, these cars, these sculptures, these industries? What were they trying to say? Your guess is as good as anyone's, and you can even improve it. 

Anything that is culture is yours, if you go and get it. The more you do that, the less you can be told by some other motherfucker what the world really is and who you really are. You'll start to see for yourself. 

*

Dudes who see for themselves are worth approximately fifty million shitheads that take a liar's word for it. Hopefully the ratio of dudes to shitheads is more favorable than that, but this seems doubtful, even naive.

--JL

#382

Dang, it takes so fuckin long to buy new window for your house. To even agree that you have bought it. It also costs enough that I seriously considered abandoning my entire life and everything I have ever believed myself to possess, that I might better imitate Christ the Messiah in all ways. Then windows would not be a complication or a sword of Damocles.

Decided not to, though. Decided to buy windows. Do the next guy a favor, I guess. Do my part for the environment?

*

One of the things about me, which perhaps communicates a volume or two about how I think the world is-as-it-is and how the world would-if-it-could-be, is that every time I feel like doing that--rejecting the material, going full Siddhartha, man without a country, silent Wandering Age philosopher, etc.--and don't, I experience a keen and thorough sense of failure, to the point of unleavened guilt before the universe for going against my own good sense and the most powerful feeling about what is right that I know. This can be so painful it can make me want to die sometimes, but because my responsibilities and commitments are anchors in that sense--as well as the original reason I don't cut myself from the hated tethers of money and social obligations I consider unethical but if not met are punishable by state-sponsored violence--I am constitutionally unable to take my own life and have always energetically rejected the deed, though this has not made the feeling any less.

The only consolation I have learned is to reflect on the idea that the time is merely not yet ripe, and someday, I will be free of all tethers, whether the fulness of time sees me survive all that I owe my alleigance to, aged to perfection and free at last, or (also, eventually) because God will strike me down whenever in infinite wisdom and compassion so total I cannot comprehend it, except to say that the compassion of God is so total that God is me, and the time and place and way I die and under what conditions are correct, and nothing to actually worry about, even if it all hurts so bad and I don't fully understand anything. At least I can imitate Christ in that.

I could continue in this thought-braid for some time; it is a familiar one, as fending off self-destruction is something I have had to master since an early age. But you get the gist, and plus, everyone's need and cure is so different in this life. 

Factually Masculine 2024, folks.

Yeah, it's on topic. Look it up.

Plus, I mentioned a few dudes and kinds of dudes that are very different than the ones I've been mainly discussing. Perhaps something to note as we move forward into the future.

*

Think I get to hit you with two more of these? I've run around behind the scenes here quite to no purpose. I forget to look. Well, we'll both find out eventually.

--JL

#381

Factually Masculine 2024 continues to be some phallic shit, my brother. 

*

Another way to define a man is to say that there is woman, and man is that human thing which is not woman. As I have stated, this is imprecise and it is more precise to say that man and woman are expressions of that thing which is human, that woman is the original template, that man is an accessory to woman, an appendage shaped by natural selection to increase genetic variation and improve survival rates for women and infants--not for themselves.

Perhaps it is a sense of injustice at the particulars of this arrangement, an unwillingness to be sacrificial of the self for the sake of the other, that drove the memetic ape's males to assert that man is the template and the progenitor, that woman exists to produce ever more masculine men and ever more pliable women. Too many men lived too long, it seems to me. This is the kind of logical lattice I notice older men are wont to suspend before the truth of the universe, because they are idle and childish and chatter like castanets about the unfairness of life. These are withered, puckered assholes who hate to work but love to eat and drink, who do not love but are profoundly interested in fucking and indeed, who shrink from no violence or base trick in their pursuit of these satisfactions. These are the men who spurn the Dao, laugh at Buddha, and crucify Christ, and having crucified him, twist his corpse to their purposes, standing it upside down and winding it in chains. These men are manipulators. Dark wizards. Men of shadows and secrets. Men who suck blood and sleep on glittering golden hoards. The mouthpieces and lickspittles of demons.

Some have wielded these powers and told these lies from father to son for so long the names don't matter. Some rise and fall. Some are new on this earth and merely aspire to snatch for themselves as much of these ill-gotten gains as they can, to drink the black waters of their own diseased fiefdom, to serve as a prop for these grotesque architectures and shore up their foundations.

Cowards and liars. Landlords and masters. A blight and a parasitic infestation striking at the roots and poisoning the fruit of the tree of masculinity. Imagine going to a tree for shelter from the rain, to find shade from the burning sun, and finding yourself swarmed with stinging insects, blinding you and paralyzing your limbs. Imagine going to take a bite of fruit, and as the flesh gives way to your fingertips and approaches your mouth, it seems to boil over with a wriggling freshet of maggots.

*

Not just them, either. How many men who want to believe themselves good have labored their lives long deluded and ensared by wicked enchantments, inextricably invested in a petty slavish mediocrity designed never to enrich or ennoble them, traveling only down paths laid out for them by men not worthy of the name, who whisper in his ear of heavens, of nations, of natural law, of the rights and duties proper to a station and the rightness and duty of station, of master races and glorious destinies, of sacred purpose and eternal glory?

Really, it breaks the heart. And still so many motherfuckers out here marching to that bleary-eyed tune, swinging their arms and walking lockstep behind anyone who promises them that they're better than a faggot, that mommy was a stupid bitch and I'm your fuckin daddy. 

--JL

#380

Been wearing the same shirt for three days, and it reeks to high heaven like a monkey in its prime because I am MAN. Hup hup! Say whatever you want, but you'll know how bad you wanna fuck me/shame me or how bad I'll kick your ass/you need to kick my ass the second you get a whiff. Information is important, and really, I feel we've been robbed of an essential dimension of our social interrelations with this mania for pretending we smell like chemical cocktails that have nothing to do with anything. It's all part of taming and manipulating the human herd animal: neutralizing odors enforces the idea that the natural state of a person is abominable and unclean; odor control and odor value can then be established along artificial lines in order to enforce class and control behavior. Think of what a woman won't do, in terror of creating her own natural odor in a perceptible way, this manifestation just one link in the criminal and intolerable chains of psychic oppression that bind her. Think of how little money a man can ultimately make, if he is unable to smell sufficiently ostentatious in the halls of power; god forbid the scent of motor oil or cow manure hang about his clothing; god forbid a dude sweats more than a little on the upper lip and that only under intolerable conditions, like fucking his wife.

Factually Masculine 2024 arrives, in-and-out-single-paragraph-palate-cleanser-tiger-phoenix style. How's that for ideas about smells? Give smells a thought. Do you even know what you really, truly smell like? You might not.  

--JL

#379

Factually Masculine 2024 resumes its powerful thrust.

*

No doubt readers have studied the previous post exhaustively and enumerated various ways I am wrong or imprecise, marshalling potent arguments which would, I am sure, level the structure of my assertions to the ground. Nevertheless, I shall pick up where I left off, after a fashion; further, I will assume that we are all in tacit agreement to at the very least hear me out to the end, and suspending our disbelief, take it as writ that I have laid the ground to build something worth taking a look at even if it is your instinct to disavow.

*

In short, I shall proceed as though we are all gentlemen here.

*

So priests lie (plus the big men they ultimately serve are liars of such outlandish bravado that they will tell you that they are like gods themselves, avatars of some kind usually, and they probably believe it), and masculinity is a design project. 

Where does that leave us, if true? It is, by the way. I mean you can disagree with that, but it makes you fucking moron. There's no kinder way to say it. Sometimes the better part of being a gentleman is being frank and direct to the total exclusion of room for misunderstanding.

*

The conclusion is simple. Socrates remains the greatest single recorded philosopher of all time (in my humble estimation) because he correctly identified that the only way to proceed, when priests lie and what people think a man is was stitched from whole cloth, is to mercilessly and infinitely interrogate the universe and interrogate yourself in pursuit of the closest thing you can find to the truth of the world and the truth of your life.

This formula is fucking unbeatable and unkillable. 

It is a matter of record that Socrates died happy, deep in the pleasures of inquiry, reveling in the beauty of imagination, his spirit in clear ascent, true to his word and his world and true to what he believed a man, most specifically, Socrates and no other man, to be. He died with his third eye open, human and awake to the end.

Most of us pass from this mortal coil in a fog of confusion and denial, tortured by fear, never conceiving what is true and natural and ecstatic about what is happening to us, turning away from it and missing the point. For why should we fear death? Socrates seemed to have no reason.

Just a tidbit to keep in mind. We press on.

*

So: Socratic interrogation and creative speculation aimed at masculinity; in brief and selectively or we'd be here awhile (as long as there was a thing that we could name man and it could ask another question, theoretically infinity).

If someone were to tell us that man is an entity distinct from woman, we could undermine that statement several different ways. You would have to show me a man that did not come from woman; further, you would have to show me a man made in this fashion who was not made in the template of man or woman, since that template comes from woman, and what comes from something retains identification with its progenitor if it is not distinct. A rock comes from rock, a chunk of granite struck from a granite boulder is a chunk of granite, though there may be much to dinstinguish it from its mother boulder now that they are both more and less. It would be more precise to say that man is a part of woman. It would be even more precise to say that man and woman are expressions of human beings. And it would be more precise yet to say that human beings express themselves as men or women and name each other men and women based on perceived differences and commonalities, because that appears to be a natural way for human beings to organize their impressions of the world that they inhabit--but there is no guarantee that our perceptions reflect reality with any degree of fidelity and indeed much evidence to the contrary, and the conclusions we cobble together from those impressions may be laughably outlandish and far from precise or optimized for application. Human beings also express themselves as animals, as radiant beings of light, as chemical reactions, as gravitational objects, as points and lines, as vibrations and waves, as assemblages and collections, as units of a society, as the bearers of the standard of the universe, as ghosts, as embodied perception collectors for the records of eternity. How human beings choose to express their maleness or their femaleness or their transcendence of the concept is something that varies tremendously across space, time, and boundaries of culture and ethnicity. 

You might say that man is a male animal with a role to play in the propagation and durablity of his species specific to his inborn physical and psychic abilities, determined by biological sex, expressed through external gonads, the production of extra testosterone, advantages in size, weight, bone and muscle growth patterns, and significant comparative physical strength compared to females of the species related to prior qualities. It looks okay at first glance, maybe it's even accurate a lot of the time. But to defend this case as a rule you would have to prove many things which one can very quickly assess you would have trouble proving: that every man that has a penis posesses significant physical strength, that every woman without a penis cannot possess comparably significant physical strength, that the lack of a penis in every case strips a man of maleness, that testosterone makes the man or estrogen the woman, that men cannot adapt to any role, that women cannot adapt to any role, that human beings cannot dispense with what turns out to be unnecessary when it comes to securing survival or obtaining freedom and the feeling of being under their own power, and further troubling subsets that complexify and ultimately make binary thought untenable in a universe of phenonemena. Exceptions to the general are a rule in that every generality is troubled by statistically significant exceptions.

Perhaps man is what we say he is for the good of society, but I have to laugh if you wanna try that one, because nothing is ever more fucked-up and untenable than the idea that society is any fucking good at all for anyone except plunderers and thieves and their descendants enthroned and unassailable in their wealth and textual power. Society is never any better than a pile of mistakes, which end in collapse, and then repeat themselves. I don't even want to talk about this one, it's stupid; men have fucked this world up the ass with their ideas about a man's place in society and it's just a bad and boring joke to say otherwise. 

I mean fuck that! Idiot. Men and women and everybody else since time immemorial have had to skirt around and live their best lives in spite of these concussed, violent, penetrative, nonconsensual ideas about what men and women are supposed to be for the good of society, re: the good of liars and thieves, as has been shown.

*

What can be said? Factually?

Only that man is a question mark.

--JL

#378

Proof, you say of my credentials to speak so confidently of what authentic masculinity looks like?

Oh, strap in motherfuckers

it's about to be 

FACTUALLY MASCULINE 2024

*

First thing to maybe keep in mind is that the body as the fulcrum of the progenital act is objectively a detached and clinical thing. Procreation as something which is involved with gender is memetic, not biological. The body that is able to impregnate happens to be vested with that equipment, and the body with the capacity for impregnation happens to be vested with equipment which interacts with the preceding. Maleness and femaleness are not significant here except as enhancers to this basic drive which we have in common with so much that is alive.

Behavior is rigid when it is encoded in instinct. Significantly, behaviors which we show to be instinctual, or are anecdotally preconscious, are reliably similar in all human beings, regardless of gender. Degrees of difference related to biological sex can be measured, but broadly, humans react instinctively to stimuli as humans, not as men and women. It is in the social sphere, in the more malleable learned behaviors, that one sees gender come into play. And the forces that work to shape our learned behaviors train us in the performance of roles that are suited to the gender not by what is set in stone but by what they dictate in the name of organizing societies, which is the layering of our instinctive group behaviors and the parallel evolution of culture.

What a man is, what we think of as a man, is something created. Something invented. Maybe it makes sense, maybe it doesn't.

Fact is, the definition changes all the time, and means different things at different times the world over.

*

Well, let's say it's not just that you don't even believe any of that, it's that you don't even believe the world is more than four thousand years old. You may think it is reasonable that said world is flat and domed and placed at the exact center of a spherical, limited universe, with the light of God coming in through holes in the dome. Let us crawl backwards diagonally into the worldview which has us as created by conscious entities operating on a different level of metaphysical reality. What I mean is let's say you think God raised Adam from the clay and breathed life into his body, and made woman as a corollary to his creation, a way by which the multiplication of Adam might be achieved. Or that we are all made from the materials of a giant, and what we are in this life depends on whether the universe fashioned us from the head, the arms, the legs, or the feet, that by our thought and deed we may, however, climb our way up through those materials and escape their affect to join the perfect eternity of the universe. There are many more just such ideas. Very likely you believe that the history of the world resembles something written down in a religious text far more than it does an objective historiography against the backdrop of geologic time. 

There are many other ways I could say it, but the crux of it is, you believe that what a man is is a thing fundamentally sacred, ordained by the divine, defined as such, and that no mistakes can be made when it comes to what a man is--evidence to the contrary is sacrilege, is defilement. 

Just gonna come out bald with it: priests lie. It's fundamental. Until you basically wake up to that, you're not gonna get any farther.

A breakdown: 

• That there is a transcencdent nature to existence, that something impalpable has a presence in the life of the world and the life of human beings, is something that has been appreciated by human beings as long as we have existed in this world.
• It cannot be true at the same time that this transcendent nature applies more concretely to your own culture, your own people, and that a human being from a different culture can correctly believe the same. Yet we all have an explanation for why we are exceptional in the eyes of the beyond. 
• This is because that is the kind of motivation that energizes and unites a tribe into becoming a culture, into organizing itself a into a society, and a society into a civilization.
• Civilizations are built on inequality. An important early distinction in human group existence was that of the shaman and the rest of the tribe, and while matriarchal and tribal norms dictated the terms of existence and the performance of gender, this was a stable and equitable arrangement; the shaman was a conduit to the beyond, a nature in which human beings were a tiny part of a vast whole. Decisions were made in this spirit that led to the spread of the human animal and others like it through vast areas in sophisticated and durable units. This would eventually lead to geographical hotspots that gave rise to populations which were able to rely on what became agriculture, bringing with it a revolution in human behavior. 
• The revolution disrupted this arrangement, and the moment was primed for new stories, stories that would serve as points of concrescence around which society could be designed and stratified by storytellers and seekers of power. Power, for the first time, could be wielded economically, through proxies, through new taboos, through further, stratifications of class driven by the rise in population and proximity, through innovations that exalted the strength of the arm and the need to pay homage to that strength, which was an extension of the strength of the beyond, the strength of universe, the strength of gods, who shaped the world--not a pack of frauds who didn't want to do any work.
• The shenanigans would only get worse and more widespread with time. Call me a liar.

*

We gotta come back to that shamanic energy. We gotta forget the dams and come back to the river, and we gotta let that river flow where it'll flow. We gotta understand that the universe is infinite, and accept no intermediaries between ourselves and the radiant light of the beyond. That we are a near-insignificant point in point in a vastness that can only be imagined and an essential and irreplacable part of that vastness. 

*

Happy Sunday motherfuckers! The sun is out where I am and the sky is an unbelievably electric shade of blue. EDIT: Factually Masculine 2024 runs seven posts, however long? Is that how I decided? I dunno. We're doing it like this now. I don't care.

--JL

#377

Number 377! Those digits add up to 17, friends, and 17 is one of the stars of this blog. 

There's more to 377, but I don't really feel up to the deep dive of why I think a number is cool today. Not because, near as I can tell, not one person has ever given one fuck about that. Just because it's difficult to even stand here and keep existing from one gaping second to the next, like a man leaping abyss after abyss and touching the razor-sharp spires of reality for but an instant before the next empty, killing vastness opens up beneath him.

*

Better than yesterday, I guess. Yesterday I would probably add that the man was set aflame along with each piercing of his feet.

*

Maybe I should be drinking more water. 

*

It is interesting how persistent my own gender identity--as a man--is, despite how disqualifying my worldview and sense of existence in that gender contradicts the term as it is generally understood. Yet, by the prevailing definitions, I am a man; I use the masculine pronouns because they fit me, I had a penis and testes when I was born and still do, puberty gave me the apple of Adam, I am a lean and muscular, narrow-hipped, hirsute exemplar of the physical class of thinking ape generally understood as male. I even have a deep voice, deeper than you might think at a glance.

And because I am a man, I hate being told that feelings or expressions of my femininity are in some way disqualifying. As a man, I hate being told who I can and can't fuck based on some stupid idea about I don't give a fuck because I'm a man. As a man, I fucking dare you to tell me I can't wear a dress, or fuck another man, or think that almost everything about masculinity is incredibly stupid and not only not worth abiding by, but is to be actively resisted. My ideas about what makes a man are correct. What most people agree a man is, especially a "great" man, can only be a twisted joke, whose punchline is mediocrity and abhorrent, unnecessary violence, a huge, crude penis drawn in excrement and blood defacing the monument of history. 

Basically since I started reading history--so, since I can remember--I have been absolutely fascinated by the implications of gender roles in that history and how they led up to my own lived experiences, not a little because I also watched Jurassic Park two hundred times and its implications and the person of Ellen Sattler loom very large in my imagination. God bless you, Laura Dern. I was reading science books as soon as I could read, too, mostly about natural history and geology, and as a matter of course they dicussed mating habits and sexual dimorphism. Jurassic Park, again, tells you a lot of important stuff: I have always operated cognizant of the fact that most complex animals are inherently female until modified, I have always understood that yes, a difference in sex as a biological feature compassing reproduction as well as physical and behavioral adaptations particular to each is a salient feature of Terran life, and I have always understood that humans are animals, brand-new animals at that; descended from earlier iterations of bipedal apes, themselves descended from primates whose other descendants we have a close kinship to, and that human history is proportionally no time at all compared to the life that has played out through the eons of the history of nature.  

As such, how our prevailing adaptations--our grossly overdeveloped cognition and the ability to establish, maintain, and develop culture--has affected our performance and ideation around these biological differences that are inert and functionally meaningless unless understood culturally and cognitively.

We made gender up. Sex is just whatever, everything out there in the world fucks everything every way it can only because it works and even if it doesn't, and we made gender up to own each other.

*

That idea, that you can own another person, that there can exist a person that is less-than based on how they were born, has poisoned this whole endeavor. 

It is. The number-one. Most bullshit, baseless, and unequivocally incorrect idea in the world, in all of history. It is the root of all the other ideas that are baseless fucking toxic ignorant bullshit.

Listen: fucking listen: that idea is Satan, the Devil. It is Ahriman. It is Morgoth. It is Cthulu. It is every writhing metaphysical virulence too terrible to name. It is the root of all evil.

*

If you read history with that in mind, it's hard to respect people who try to tell you how to be. 

It is up to us to invent new ways to be. God damn near everything behind us radioactive. We have to hold on tightly to the precious things we're blessed to have despite it all, move forward, and step into the future with courage. 

We have to go up and in.

We have to do what we can to transform this narrative.

*

Once more: as a man, I have the right to live however the fuck I want. Other men don't get to tell me fuck-all. I determine what a man is for myself, not you or anybody else. Some simping fucking slave doing and thinking what other men do just because they're too small-hearted to stand the fuck up thinks they can tell me how to live? It boggles the fucking mind. 

--JL

*look, I was basically Roald Dahl's Matilda except without the math, and as she was the single most relatable character I ever encountered in children's fiction, there you have that. Matilda of Matilda, Ellen Sattler of Jurassic Park, and Rachel and Cassie from The Animorphs: my mothers and sisters and preeminent feminine role models in the cultural absorptions of my prepubescence.

Of course I grew up respecting women. Can you imagine what Ellen would say if I didn't? Let alone Rachel? The way Cassie and Matilda would look at me? Please. Unbearable and not to be thought of. No one can be a perfect gentleman every time, but I have always known that women are as human as I am, which, given history, given the state of society, is a responsibility. I'm not great with a lot of responsibilities, but any time any form of outside pressures urged me to think or behave otherwise, I have bucked and kicked like a bull with his big old balls and done my best to gore a motherfucker where he lives, or bust out the paddock and charge away from the abbatoir.

Some challenges are just too crucial to ever let yourself fail. You have to stand up. You have to be a fucking man sometimes. 

#376

Once in some of the most helpless throes of my drunkenness--my profound, acute alcoholism--I took a sheet of paper and ran it through my typewriter three different ways, writing the word "rape" over and over, sometimes in all caps, sometimes all small, sometimes the word six or seven times with no breaks. Rape straight forwards, rape sideways, rape upside down. I was all alone, my girflriend at the time passed out upstairs. The recall is in flashes, suffused with the feeling of being set on fire over and over, reliving things I didn't let myself fully remember when I was sober until years later.

Years later, a couple of years into our relationship, my ex-fiancee saw this sheet of paper when I was going through old piles of work. She told me that I needed to get into therapy, that the artifact was a deeply disturbing glance into a psyche whose potential implications terrified her. I gave her the conditions and background of its production, and she simply repeated herself and walked away. Then I believe she made herself forget what had just happened, as it never came up again, not then and never in the year-plus of couples therapy I let her drag me into.

It was not uncommon, my lived experiences taking a backseat to something she reflexively intellectualized and would not budge on, as well as reactions and proscriptions her social training had instilled in her. Certainly less common is that we left something like that unaddressed, perhaps unique in the relationship, except of course for everything implied but unsaid and everything left buried, as yet unexhumed. I gave her the last word almost all the time. It was very difficult for me not to. She was rigid, and I wanted her to be comfortable and safe, even if I had to mute my own discomfort or pain. 

Well, we must presume we loved each other as best we could, and try to move along.

*

The preceding section, yesterday's first post, and the increased feelings of insanity and pain (already at high levels) I have referenced very recently have me thinking about that sheet of paper, which is the first archival evidence of the extent to which I was raped, or sexually molested if you like, by an older girl on a school bus. I will allow for a worldview in which men cannot be raped by women, or small boys by girls about to graduate from high school, if you will meet me halfway at sexual molestation, ok? Whatever the fuck you want, I guess. I'll even leave the word "assault" out of it. 

Why have these feelings increased? Because I am currently grappling with a situation in which I feel sexually targeted by a woman who has power over me and that could explode in my face fifty different ways. 

So, that's fucking great and awesome, and not a living nightmare aimed at my worst trauma. I doesn't have me clawing at my own head at all.

*

This is why I personally need universal basic income, and to not have to spend it on essentials; this is part of why I've been hammering at this point. Because having enough to survive on and be sheltered guaranteed is more than enough for me to be able to truly contribute the best of myself to society, without having to expose myself to to these kinds of situations. It should be said somehwere if it hasn't been already: what we are talking about when we are talking about materially providing for universal human rights that include the bottom of Maslow's pyramid--safety (which in a world of capital must include financial safety), nutrition, and shelter--is not just ease or the reduction of unjust pressures on the masses that serve to enrich the already enriched. We are talking about freedom. We are talking about ordinary people not being subject to systems and processes that are set up to give one person power over another in a way that they cannot escape because nutrition and shelter supersede safety. Why do you think so fucking many reported and ureported assaults go down at work or school?

Let us be safe, let us have our basic needs regardless of what some employer thinks they should get out of us for the sake of the shareholder, and we will be able to protect ourselves and simply go somewhere where we are not treated like chattel, where our bodies and our minds are not considered property at the disposal of those who can buy and sell us. Make that power dynamic rare to the vanishing point. 

Fucking just let us stand up. Just take the boot off our necks, and it will be ok. I say it will be ok because if we are pushed to the point where we have get it off ourselves, when we do, we will not put the boot on your necks. We will break your back like a snake in a yard, and we will kill you where you lie. It doesn't matter if some Napoleon comes along after the Terror. That's for us to deal with. You'll be guillotined. We'll see who's glib about living through history when you're the one one your fucking knees with the blade hanging over your neck.

*

Maybe it's not a good idea to post that? But I'm fucking gonna. I have to. I'm just a man in his special bathtub, scribbling, and if I get stabbed, I get stabbed.

Yeah, I'm not about the rehabilitation of the French nobility in modern historiography. Fuck a monarch. Fuck a landed class. It was a fucked up mess that went too far, but it doesn't change the fact that they got what was coming.

Too much historical writing is about sucking power's dick in the name of "stability". Well, that's only how you feel in your cushy little office. Most of us have never lived in anything like a stable world, and that wealthy people developed a cattle class as a buffer between themselves and the slave class is a trick that has run its course, especially because that vaunted "stability" was nothing but a public relations cloak draped over the imminent total collapse of all world systems. And the motherfuckers driving that collapse are types of organisms who think themselves safe and protected from all that, but there are only a very few of them, despite the size of their material and textual footprint, despite the loudness of their voices, despite the fact that there a hundreds of millions of meatpuppets willing to echo those voices out of fear or delusion.

So for fuck's sake, man. Get lost with this idea that enormous companies steered by sociopaths have made the world better by destroying nature. Get lost with this interpretation of the statistics that tells you that everyone is happier, safer, and better-fed than ever in history. That's the cloak. That's the PR. That, if you want to understand it with full viscerality, is the lubricated condom used to penetrate this world and fuck it to death. They told you they would free you because they wanted to use you, because they wanted you to be complicit, and that is how they frame their justifications: I was satisfying demand. I was providing. I was working harder than you.

A whore gets money and safety from a pimp, until they're thrown into the street used up, or simply murdered. Do you get this comparison. Do you understand.  

*

Sure, we got some nice things out of it; the computer I'm typing on, the books that surround me as I type, the video games downstairs. But it was a loan, the interest was undisclosed, and now that it's come due fifty times higher than we were led to even imagine, it will be almost impossible to pay it off. So where do we get the money? Or, how do we make it go away? 

If you're able to answer this question from a position of power, I suggest you do it now, at the cost of some of that power, which I know is scary. But necessary, because an answer will have to be forthcoming, and it will be much, much scarier if we have to come up with it ourselves. 

It won't be organized. It won't be the revolution of the proletariat, which you're not scared of because you know it's bullshit. It will be instinctive ape action. It will be an animal at its most dangerous--wounded, panicked, desperate to survive.

--JL